Harassment. This is how Huawei’s representative to the European institutions, Abraham Liu, described on Tuesday 21 May the American decision to place the Chinese giant on the black list of companies with which American companies are not allowed to work (see EUROPE 12258/9, 12256/22). This decision will become effective within 90 days, the US authorities said the day before.
"This is not just an attack on Huawei, but also to liberal, rules-based order and this is dangerous", he said during a presentation in Brussels at his cyber security centre, saying that the decree adopted by Donald Trump on May 15 was contrary to what the European and American founding fathers had in mind. Abraham Liu invoked the principle of the rule of law and stated that this was a common challenge, as the Trump administration also threatened European cars.
On the concrete impact of the US decree, which has already prompted Google to announce the end of its collaboration with Huawei, he said that the existing models would be preserved overall.
But the question of future models is clearly raised. "The major result is that European consumers may lose the option of choosing the second biggest smartphones provider. That’s an extreme situation. In terms of free market competition, there are challenges.," said Abraham Liu.
He encouraged the European Union countries not to exclude Huawei from the deployment of the 5G network. According to him, Huawei respects European rules and its equipment is to a large extent European, ‘tailor-made for Europe's needs’ and made with the help of European workers (12,200 employees in Europe).
Asked by EUROPE about the possibility that Huawei might market its own operating system in the near future, to replace Google’s Android system, Abraham Liu was rather cautious: "It's a very technical question. I know that Huawei's CEO, Ren Zhengfei, had once mentioned in front of the media that we are working on our own OS (operating system). It was quite a time ago (years or months ago). But I don't have the latest information on this”. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)