Huawei Unaffected by US Pressure as it Announces 40 5G Worldwide Deals

Technology, Financials, Automotive Author: Qasim Khan Apr 17, 2019 10:50 AM (GMT+8)

Huawei Technologies announced it has signed 40 5G contracts worldwide and shipped 70,000 5G base stations as of April 2019.

"Choose Huawei for greater security" GUO Ping, Huawei's Deputy Chairman of the Board. PHOTO: Huawei

It seems as if Huawei Technologies, the largest telecom equipment vendor in the world, has not suffered a huge negative impact from the US government for the so-called national security reasons. The company said on Tuesday that it has already secured 40 commercial 5G deals around the world as of April 2019. 

The comments come a day after Reuters reported, citing sources and documents, that the United States will push allies at a meeting in Prague next month to adopt shared security and policy measures that will make it more difficult for Huawei to dominate 5G telecommunications networks.

David WANG, a senior executive of Huawei said "Huawei voluntarily gave up participating in 5G network building in the US and is still working with the Australian market on 4G and on some 5G trials," he further added, "As to other countries, Huawei has been actively taking part in their 5G rollout, and we won't see big change in terms of our geographic involvement at the global scale."

Of the new total, Huawei signed 23 contracts in Europe, 6 in Asia-Pacific, 10 in the Middle East and one in Africa. Huawei also said has shipped over 70,000 5G base stations and expects to have shipped 100,000 by May, said Ken HU Houkun, the rotating chairman of Huawei, at HAS2019, an annual global analyst summit held on Tuesday in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.

As more 5G smartphones hit the market in the second half of 2019, the industry will see much stronger confidence in the use of 5G technology in a variety of scenarios and boost the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and AI. 

Talking about external challenges, HU said “Politicizing the issue is a bigger challenge, not only for Huawei but also for the wider industry.”

When asked about selling chips to Apple Hu said “We have not had discussions with Apple on this issue.” reiterating that Huawei does not plan to become a chipset vendor at this time. He also said he looked forward to Apple’s competition in the 5G phone market.

These comments came after Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said in an interview with CNBC this week that the company is “open to” selling its 5G modem chips to Apple, without elaborating.

Apple is behind rivals such as Samsung Electronics and Huawei in delivering 5G equipped phones that are expected to provide fresh momentum in a slumping global smartphone market.

Intel Corp, the supplier of modem chips for iPhones, has said its 5G chips will not appear in mobile phones until 2020, which to an extent means that Apple, its biggest customer, will probably be more than a year behind rivals in delivering phones that use the faster 5G networks.

Samsung started selling 5G phones in South Korea this month ahead of the global introduction of 5G networks, and Huawei, whose smartphones outsold iPhones in the fourth quarter, plans to launch a 5G phone in June 2019.

Apple held talks with Samsung, Intel, and Taiwan's MediaTek Inc to supply 5G modem chips for 2019 iPhones, according to an Apple executive's testimony at a trial between Qualcomm Inc and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier this year.

Huawei in January launched its 5G modem Balong 5000, which it said is the industry’s most powerful, as well as a 5G base station chipset dubbed Tiangang.

Cambricon Technologies, world's first smart chip company with successful outflow and mature products, has been the biggest supplier of mobile chips for Huawei, as for now since Huawei has comeup with its own Chip, Cambricon will be loosing one of its  largest buyer. 

The company last month reported a 25% rise in net profit in 2018 to CNY 59.3 billion (USD 9 billion), even as revenue from its network equipment business fell 1.3% to CNY 294 billion due to telecommunications industry investment cycles.