Huawei founder bets Sino-US trade war won’t happen – but could he be wrong?
Ren Zhengfei, who established Huawei in 1987 and serves as its chief executive, expects the US and China to eventually reach a compromise on their trade dispute
One of China’s most respected and influential businessmen is betting that a trade war with the United States will not happen. But is he right?
The answer is potentially worth billions of dollars, not least for Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei, whose company is once again in the crosshairs of US authorities as a national security threat.
The signs, however, point to an escalation of trade tensions between the US and China.
Those included the US House of Representatives’ approval last week of a defence spending bill that bars the Pentagon from buying goods and services from Chinese telecommunications equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE Corp. The Federal Communications Commission proposed in April to block any company that poses a national security risk from supplying equipment to a government-subsidised programme.
Ren, who serves as the chief executive at Huawei, was adamant that a trade war between the US and China “will not take place”, despite recent developments, because the two sides “should eventually reach a compromise”, according to a memo shared online by the company to its employees on Wednesday.
That means Huawei “will still purchase 50 million sets of chips from Qualcomm this year,” Ren said. “We will never go against each other … We will always be friends with companies like Intel, Broadcom, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google and Qualcomm.”
