Huawei counts cost of Western bans as UK business withers Huawei's business in Britain has dwindled in the half-decade since the UK acquiesced to demands from the US to ban the Chinese networking giant from local telco networks. In its latest profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31, 2024, Huawei Technologies UK generated just £188.2 million ($159.6 million) in …
I think you missed my point really, which was that if Huawei posed such a security risk, then why was this limited to 5G Networks?
Really this was down to protectionism, the US wanted to give companies like Qualcomm a leg up.
The US doesn't need a stake in the vendor to tamper with their tech, they were caught putting back doors into Cisco kit years ago (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald-nsa-tampers-us-internet-routers-snowden). The US is worried that other countries will do what they've been up to for years, but they're the "good guys" so should completely be trusted with it and there's no risk of them becoming an authoritarian police state with the army on the streets, right?
You can't beat a bit of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt being sown to make sure a company gets treated like a hot potato.
There seems to be a lot of stoking of tensions based on, what it seems to me at least, limited actual evidence there's shenanigans afoot.
I spend half my time at home tinkering with things to see what they do.
If you want some fun, install a PiHole and watch your network traffic.
All those "smart" devices you have are all calling home!
The article is wrong. It wasn't US pressure that got Huawei banned in the UK. It was mostly UK pressure. The fear uncertainty and doubt was generated by the intelligence services. Who warned both the UK and US governments during the 2nd Obama administration. Hence the UK did a deal with Huawei to have that software centre in Oxfordshire so we could audit their software.
Boris Johnson then announced that nothing more was going to be done, after Trump had banned their kit. And there was a pretty large political backlash here, accusing him of being soft on China. Plus some grumpy public comments from "intelligence sources" making their way to the papers. Then there was a u-turn a few months later, and Johnson was immediately accused of kow-towing to Trump.
Yet in the same week France quietly banned Huawei kit, and a week or two after the Netherlands and Denmark did, with their governments partly citing warnings from UK intelligence services.
I don't know if some intelligence changed. Because pressure from Trump was unlikely to affect France, especially as Germany refused to back down and kept Huawei kit allowed for anther couple of years, even as most of the rest of the EU banned it.
The other reason was economic. If you let China subsidise their network supplier's R&D so that all your network companies go out of business, then you've got no response to future shennanigans, even if ones aren't currently happening.
But the idea that the Chinese communist party are reliable or trustworthy is utterly laughable. Even if you're not certain they're up to something now, it's clear that the policy of welcoming China into the global market has been a mistake, and short of change in the regime we're going to get twenty years of Cold War from that policy, if not an actual hot war over Taiwan. There were good reasons to try it - but vastly enriching a country run by an aggressive dictatorship has some quite serious downsides. The Party at least seemed a lot less aggressive before Xi took over, but they chose him. Even if he's purged quite a few of them since.
> If you let China subsidise their network supplier's R&D so that all your network companies go out of business,
That's a canard. The problem is that Huawei is employee owned. Not having a fleet of investors, analysts, hedge funds and what-have-you to satisfy quarter to quarter gives it a lot more flexibility in how it invests. This isn't their fault, its the fault of "the system".
They're actually no different from other closely held companies. I've worked at several and the difference between them and what happens after the get bought out or go IPO is like night and day. The inevitable result is leverage -- debt -- which has to be serviced. This drains the company's resources which inevitably change its business model. There's pressure on investment and headcount, for a start, but also a need to focus resources on larger, more lucrative markets. This, if you recall, is where Huawei got its foothold. Telcoms is a huge business but one that tends to focus only on the larger markets (unlike the old national telecom organizations which tried to service the entire country/territory as a public good). This left a lot of areas under served, neglected. This was the opportunity that Huawei exploited -- they got their foothold in these markets and then expanded to other markets. Being able to continually invest in technologies meant that by the time 5G turned up they effectively owned it, having not only a preponderance of patents in the pool but a full suite of solutions ready for the market a good two years or more ahead of anyone else. The rest is history -- as we all know, politicians and PR staff are a lot cheaper than engineers.....
Too right. And judging by the downvotes, a majority of Register readers have fallen for the anti-Chinese rhetoric and lies. (E.g. Huawei isn't run by the CCP; of course it takes notice of Chinese law and political pressure, just as British companies take notice of UK law and politics, and as so many US companies have taken a Trumpian turn.)
Disengaging with China will prove to be a blunder of historical dimensions.
>Disengaging with China will prove to be a blunder of historical dimensions.
Well it does look like, from this week's events in Beijing, the Chinese government is preparing the ground for a new and much larger market for Chinese goods...
Bets on when Putin bankrupts/defaults and Ukraine now borders Greater China...
Huawei, which previously agreed to annual checks on its products by GCHQ
Given that GCHQ didn't prevent the exfiltration of data by one of their own interns - he was only collared after the event, could you trust GCHQ to spot nefarious code before the damage is done?
The US ordered its 'allies' (using the term loosely) to block Huawei from 5G and they did. There was no more of a security issue than you get from ropey MS updates, and less than you get from NSA back doors, or in the UK's case, outsourcing govt services to France in the middle of the 'small boats' farrago.
But this is the UK, which is winding down since the sterling drop at Brexit and the blocks on migrant labour and foreign students. People are skint, companies are running on empty, services aren't working and the government have cracked down on the internet - the Golden Goose of the global economy. It doesn't really matter if the UK doesn't have 5G for a few years, if ever in non-urban areas. The economy is circling the drain and nobody is going to roll out new tech here anyway. If you develop it here, it can be sold or moved abroad. AI is a scam and there is no real roadmap of forward innovation. GAFA hasn't innovated properly in years. Just a series of scams - metaverse, NFTs, blockchain and now AI.
The one thing the UK still has is the Pi, which could be leveraged into a simpler, secure-by-design PC with a non-US OS. They might even be able to squeeze out a version without back doors for use in the RotW, although the govt. might demand UK models are hobbled. There are Pi PCs, but no real retail marketing and some of the issues of OS choice that have crippled Linux in the retail environment. If Linux had been co-created by Steve Jobs, for all his faults, it would have been an OS not a kernel, and might have sunk MS by now.
Oh, and it doesn't matter how good or bad GCHQ is. It fulfils a political function regardless of its tech abilities. Ditto the government - they don't have to be any good, they just have to get elected to be in charge. So we get crap Tories, then crap Labour and next crap Reform. That's how it works.
Do what you like with your island. Chinese don’t care anymore. UK is a sinking boat with different clowns running it, and UK has been puppy to US for decades (hard to imagine US was the colony of UK 200+years ago). You can argue you made right call, and China and Huawei are evil. But we really don’t care. There are 85% of humanity living outside of the « the west bloc » , as long as the majority sees China is good, that’s enough. And Huawei’s continuous growth as a company demonstrates that too.
Apple were panicking about the prevelence of Hauwei phones globally, and the fact they were severely eating in to sales of the iPhone. Hauwei phones like the Mate 10/Mate 20 were much better built, better performing and had WAY better battery life than anything out of Cupertino. Someone in Apple complained enough to someone at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave that the ban was enacted.
Same with the 5G infra. Huawei was dominating ADSL rollouts, other players complained bitterly, got Huawei banned.
Still miss my Mate 20...
They sold a few of our systems. It was good business. They then requested a reference system in Shenzhen for troubleshooting, which we duly provided. They asked the test engineer who conducted the acceptance testing for the root and build passwords, which he provided - big mistake. We never did business with them after that...
I'm no fan of the Real Donald J Trump (can't stand the man), but feel I must thank him for saving my job on a couple of occasions. Huawei are how they are (and subject to Chinese law), which is a pity. I've heard nothing but good things about the quality of their 5G equipment.
