Huawei Chief Says No to Banning Apple As Trade Countermeasure

Huawei’s life as a smartphone maker has become markedly more difficult ever since it became the focus of a trade spat between China and the United States.

But that doesn’t mean that Huawei’s chief and founder wants to see the same thing happen to Apple in China, even though a lot of Internet commenters and others are calling for it.

Ren Zhengfei said of the call to ban Apple, “That will not happen, first of all. And second of all, if that happens, I’ll be the first to protest.”

Completing a round of media interviews across the world to reassure major trading and technology partners that Huawei would overcome this setback, the CEO’s “grace under fire” approach as The Verge calls it has won him some fans in the trade disagreement.

Of course, we mainly know Huawei for their smartphone cameras and how they try to pioneer cutting-edge technology in that area. Prior to the trade spat, the biggest thing we had to discuss concerning Huawei was Leica’s use of the Tiananmen Square incident in a marketing video made by a Brazilian ad agency.

Needless to say, Huawei’s issues since then have gotten more serious and the Leica issue isn’t such a big deal. Central to the trade argument that the United States under the Trump administration has launched against Huawei is that the company will somehow undermine national security and international intelligence exchange agreements with US ally nations.

But there aren’t any real specifics around that. Outside of national security, Huawei is also being accused of everything under the sun including unfairly flooding markets with their smartphones. Everything really started coming to a head when Google announced that it would cut Huawei smartphones off from future Android versions and access to the Google Play store.

Since then, it has seemed like everyone has started to pile on to the company’s problems.

You can read our coverage of it by clicking here.

As usual, we’d love to know your thoughts on what is going on with Huawei and what resolution you see happening with this situation.

[The Verge]