Huawei set to exit server, storage, networking business in the UK Huawei is yanking a bunch of Enterprise product lines from the UK in the wake of a business review, saying the campaign waged by US President Donald Trump hasn’t helped its plight on this side of the pond. The embattled Chinese giant confirmed it has told its channel partners and customers, some of whom told us that Huawei has …
> just one more civil war or decides to make it the best of three.
Don't think that changes much.
Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore are all in Ca or NM.
Oak Ridge is in Tennessee but I don't think they let any locals near the complicated stuff.
F150s with Trump stickers vs Nukes .....
Everyone in both parties agrees that dealing with China's trade abuses is long overdue. The question has been in how to do so.
Trump's blunt instrument of bluster and pandering wouldn't be the method any reasonable president would use, but the current situation would still be used as a starting point for negotiations - you wouldn't roll back some of the sanctions on Huawei without getting something in return.
Plus it remains to be seen how much of what the UK was doing around Huawei was US pressure and how much was their own intelligence assessment and/or BoJo's being similar to Trump. I really doubt a change in administration in the US is going to cause the UK to reverse course and reopen their market to Huawei. If for no other reason than pride, not wanting to be seen as a pawn of the US.
By "Trade Abuses" you surely mean "producing competitive producs"?
>cause the UK to reverse course and reopen their market to Huawei.
The UK has this rather arrogant notion that its doing everyone a favor by allowing them to sell products to them. This is all back to front; you need the products because you don't have the national capability to produce this kit, it wasn't a profitiable way to invest money. Companies would like to sell you kit but they have other markets that are less bothersome to work with so why bother with the irritant? If the UK becomes a technological backwater -- 'if' being questionable -- then its no skin of anyone else's nose, its the UK's business.
Look around you for equipment that's designed and made in the UK. Compared to the world I grew up there's bascially nothing -- practically everything you use is imported, not just the 'things' but the underlying technology.
Exactly this. There is no free trade with China, it is all lopsided. You want access to the Chinese market, you give them what they want first. You try to put conditions on Chinese companies getting access to Western markets, it's unfair and they impose sanctions and/or tariffs.
And when China "licences" IP, it just means they can use it whenever they want - it amounts to theft. Then they copy it and patent it wherever they can get away with it.
That's why the US has gone the way they have, just giving China a taste of its own business practices.
We "don't have the national capability to produce this kit" because it's comically cheaper to import it from China. Because the Chinese economy is massively lower cost. "Lower Cost" here means no employee protections, tiny wages, slave-labour working conditions, no environmental controls, free-and-easy attitude to (foreign) IP, and a massively pro-export trade policy. Since we don't want to live in that kind of society, making things in the UK costs more.
The universal "Made in PRC" label on the bottom of anything in the shops is a massive failure of trade and industry policy, not some magical "efficiency" in China.
>no employee protections, tiny wages, slave-labour working conditions, no environmental controls, free-and-easy attitude to (foreign) IP...
I can't speak for all jobs in China (obviously) but note that a colleague's new in-laws tended to regard the couple as the 'poor relations'. (I live in California, BTW.) The relatives that worked in industry at comparable jobs earned similar money but the cost of living was a lot lower (taxes and housing costs, for example). This doesn't mean there's a rush to move to China -- the middle class there looks to buy real estate on the West Coast and other desirable locations as soon as they accumulate some money.
Its complicated, but I can assure you that you don't run state of the art assembly lines with slave labor. The part of China that does a lot of technology manufacturing -- Guangdong -- actually 'looks a bit like Califorina" according to another colleague that travels there on business. (If by that he means the Bay Area then Heaven Help Them....)
The numbers tell the story. China's colleges are turning out about 35,000 engineers a year.Huawei has about 45,000 working on R&D. They may have needed to copy to learn but like the Japanese before them (who, incidentally, also like asymmetrical traffic in IP) they rapidly learn how to do things themselves.
Indeed - when I visited Shenzhen a few years ago then engineer salaries were comparable with the west, life is not cheap, property prices often exceed those in New York. If you are snapping together phones at a Foxconn factory this may not be the case, but tech-workers are well paid...to the extent that many Chinese producers are outsourcing work to places like Indonesia to save money. Foxconn is moving work to India.
" If you are snapping together phones at a Foxconn factory this may not be the case, but tech-workers are well paid"
Actually they're better paid than their brethren in the UK or USA - which you unknowingly make clear with the sentence:
"many Chinese producers are outsourcing work to places like Indonesia to save money. Foxconn is moving work to India."
One of the reasons China's heavily investing in automation systems is because the cost of labour around Shenzhen has been higher than in western countries for nearly a decade. Where Shenzhen wins is LOGISTICS and agility - they understand customer service and the importance of an intangible called "goodwill" in ways that MBAs and accountants fixated on maximising short term profits do not
Incidentally, one of Huawei UK's biggest hurdles to sales over the last 5 years has been "Huawei UK" - the chinese made the mistake of employing traditional British sales and management staff who've quite effectively screwed the pooch in terms of goodwill
"The universal "Made in PRC" label on the bottom of anything in the shops is a massive failure of trade and industry policy,"
It's rather ironic that the world champions and pushers of global free trade are whining about the successes of global free trade
Any failures are entirely self inflicted, not China's fault - the list of UK trade and industry screwups (usually government directed) would fill several pages
Reading Neville Shute's "Slide Rule" autobiography might give an idea just HOW badly the UK government has been cocking things up every time it attempted to exert control as well as how UK rigidly hierarchical management structures led directly to things like the Comet disasters (no, it wasn't the windows. The real cause is more complicated and the windows were a convenient "out" to avoid people facing personal criminal liabilities)
"The UK has this rather arrogant notion that its doing everyone a favor by allowing them to sell products to them. "
It also expects everyone to fawn all over them because they're British
Funnily enough that was China's attitude about 200 years ago, just before "the century of humilation" started
Yes. Even the accommodating and level-headed EU is now criticising China and their one-sided relationship with the rest of the world.
I am no fan of Trump by any means but do wonder if anyone else would have taken aim at China in the (blunt) way he did. Cameron and Osborne certainly didn't. Alongside the chaos Trump has caused domestically and globally, he may well be remembered as a sort of necessary evil with regard to changing the narrative on China.
Part of the way that had previously been attempted was via the TPP - provide a trade deal linking other major trading partners on both sides of the Pacific that left China on the outside, and if they wanted to get in on it down the road they'd have to agree to make changes.
It ended up becoming a political football and while everyone else signed it the US opted out. Whether it would have been good or bad for the US who knows (at least I don't since I never learned much about it other than the name) but if it had resulted in China making concessions in their unfair practices it would have been worth it for the US even if there were some other less positive consequences.
The way Trump has gone from trying to put together a trade deal with China to practically starting a cold war with them will have long term consequences for the US. Not to mention changes around the Iran agreement, NAFTA, wishy washy statements about NATO and so forth. Even allies doubt the US commitment towards them now due to how quickly things can change when a hostile administration comes to power, so those who are not allies have even less reason to trust that deals they make would be honored beyond the next election. Not to mention how much reason it gives them to hold off on making deals if they think a future administration will give them a better one.
While Trump will eventually be out of office (hopefully sooner rather than later) the sort of voter he appealed to is still going to be around - he seems to have permanently changed the republican party. They're much more likely to nominate someone like Trump or BoJo in 2024 versus someone like Bush or Reagan, so unfortunately the Buchanan/Trump/BoJo party will be around for a while (whether they can get elected again when demographic changes are close to turning important republican strongholds like Texas and Georgia into swing states is another matter)
DS999,
To be fair to Trump (ugh!) The TPP was dead at the last US election, since Clinton was against it as well. It used to be the Democrats who were cooler on free trade than the Republicans remember. That all changed with Trump (though it's not like there weren't rumblings of discontent before). So it's not all on him for killing off that policy.
Obviously his bull-in-a-China-shop trade policy is all his own, I can't imagine Clinton, or any other normal politician behaving like that. But then the Chinese government aren't above behaving that way, so I'm short of sympathy - I just don't think it was the right way to go about doing anything.
The thing about trade policy though is that it has to be politically sustainable. Governments can only give so many trade concessions before the electorate make it an issue - and things have to change. I think globalisation reached that point a while back and so while it's going to cost the global economy a lot in lost economic efficiency (and thus wealth generated for everyone), I don't see how politicians can do otherwise than try to onshore some jobs - or at least publicly reduce the obvious piss-taking of governments like China's.
If the Chinese Communist Party were more democratic they'd realise that there's only so much they can poke the West (i.e. their major market) before they get a reaction. The previous regime was I think aware of that, but Xi Jinping appears to be as aggressively nationalist as Trump (if not more) with delusions of grandeur - hence having himself made dictator for life. Whereas the previous system was in no way democratic, but was at least more pluralist and with a recognition that absolute power corrupts, so the leadership was changed every 10 years. These are the people that remember the Mao purges, and therefore why you want to avoid any one person having totaly power, even in a one-party dictatorship.
I don't see the Democrats becoming total fans of free trade overnight, just because their man's in the White House. Hopefully next January. The EU are also building a system of what they call trade defence - which means more tools to target tariffs at specific companies, countries or market sectors where they believe unfair competition is happening. At the same time they EU are also talking about relexing their own competition law in order to allow the EU to effectively subsidise its own big companies to become global champions. Now that Germany has shifted to support France on this, it may happen - as they've often been the swing vote in these sorts of issues - being for free trade when it suits their exporters but sometimes for protectionism at home. Don't know if the Dutch and Scandinavians will be able to block it.
Did you get these points in your morning email from the DNC?
TPP was a bad deal. Just like NAFTA was a bad deal,, just like many in the UK believed the EU was a bad deal for them. TPP was just another trade deal the left the US is a weak trading position. Negotiated by those who believe it is necessary to "level" the playing field so that the "BAD" U.S. give subsidized the other parties. This is the thinking that has existed since 1045 and Trump finally said NO, we are not doing this again.
He made a trade deal with China that was beneficial tot he US, but then China deliberately failed to act on the Wuhan virus, possibly deliberately released this virus. I would not doubt that one minute!
NATO? Our commitment has not changes, what has changes is Europe is not required to pay their share, the share they agreed to from the beginning. We are tired of subsidizing your security while you turn and criticize us for out "social policy". You have the money for your Social Policies because WE are paying for your safety! No more!
Of course the Chinese are waiting, waiting for the puppet Biden who they know they can control.
So what sort of voter does Trump appeal to? Those who get up every morning, go to work, pay their bills and just want to be left alone? That's who.
What sort of voter does Biden appeal to? Those who believe they are entitled to a life paid for by someone else, those who go out and riot, loot and burn when they don't get what they want or someone says something they do not like. Please don't start with this BLM tripe! If those leftist cared one whit for black lives they would do something about all the innocent black lives killed every day by other feral blacks.
Why would we want another Bush? Bush Sr. was an idiot who got plaid by the Left and cause an economic down turn (a deliberate one) that ended his presidency. Bush Jr was a moron who was controlled by the Neo-Con globalists who want endless wars and disastrous trade policies.
Demographic changes in Texas and Georgia? Hardly. The only thing that will swing Texas and Georgia to the left will be mail in fraud. The real demographic change is the flight from NY, NJ, PA and CA. People are leaving in droves, you cannot even rent a U-Haul in NYC now because of all the people leaving. Why do you think the Democrats are holding out on a relief package, because they know NY and NYC will not survive without Federal help because their tax base is evaporating.
No, people like you are just all butt-hurt because your precious ideology is now being exposed for the lie is it and always was.
Chaos? What chaos has "he" cause. Why. because he looked at the world and said "NO!" No more one sided trade with China, No more endless wars that do not resolve anything and had dubious reasoning in the first place, No more ringing our hands over "offending" the Palestinians who will never agree to any peace with Israel, No more looking the other way while the Left in the US lie, cheat and use government agencies and law enforcement as political tools, No more standing idle while Democrat politician make backroom deals to enrich their families. (BTW, he does not need to use his position to enrich his family, they were already rich, unlike the Bidens), No to the globalist who have caused decades of destruction to western economies.
The problem the world has with Trump is he does not play the game that has been going on for the last century that has decimated average families in most of the developed world. The game, that doesn't enrich CEOs, doesn't enrich the already rich, it enriches politicians of a single ideology. Those who LIE about their intentions to "Help the average man". No, they want to keep everyone on the brink of poverty and make them believe if you just give all the power and wealth to them that "they" will take care of you.
No, do not blame Trump because the World is having a childish tantrum because he told them NO!
China stole so much IP from US companies, anyway?
or have they?
Just wondering how one empire might steal IP from another...
Does the US have evidence they don't want to reveal for fear of alerting the opponent of their capabilities?
Can you ever prove - or disprove - a conspiracy?
Who will win the next cup final?
(sorry for slipping in a bit of reality there.)
The numbers tell the story.
Huawei is China's version of Bell Labs. Back in the day Bell Labs and its manufacturing affiliate, Western Electric, dominated telecommunications with both basic research and product development. We decided that it was a waste of good profit to spend all this money on R&D so we split up the Bell System into a bunch of regional companies and rebranded Bell Labs as Lucent. Without the phone system subsidy Lucent gradually became unprofitable and eventually it was sold off to Alcatel which eventually got absorbed by Nokia. Employment in these companies dwindled; the money, as ever, was in selling services so the phone network became dominated by cell companies, cable networks and the like, all rather more intent on selling plans than building equipment.
We are to blame for this situation, not the Chinese. They've got the infrastructure and people to develop systems, we don't. The best we can come up with is OpenRAN and a bunch of startup hopefuls. We can also pretend that Nokia and Ericsson are really US companies that just happen to be located in 'friendly' territory.
UK readers will know this type of story well. I used to work in the UK but gave up years ago because of the systematic de-industrialization of the country. The US offered better opportunities at the time because of its size but its been following the UK model; being larger it took longer to fall but now in many areas its a shadow of its former self. Like the UK the US is unable to fully come to terms with what its done, how the financialization of everything has led it to a situation where it only knows how to make money, not product, and like the UK it points to an ever dwindling set of exceptions to convince itself that its not really happening.
Exactly,
There are so many things that we used to do really well that have been destroyed, either by being sold off to foreign companies or stripped via venture capitalist investments.
And much of the issue around Huawei in particular are about some large and very rich incumbents in the US that are seeing their market share being depleted, not just on cost but because they no longer have superior products.
Yes there are all the allegations around security but is not going to be alone in this. In many ways the US is probably as bad if not worse than China because they arrogantly believe that they are "right & good" and everyone else is "bad".
And you think that this occurred due to the stumbling along of foolish leadership? No, this is all a deliberate policy. The Leftist want the Western economies to falter, why? Because without people suffering economic hardship, who needs the Leftists. The Globalist money-changers want this because it makes them easy money without all that messy manufacturing and payroll and those annoying employees. Just move it to countries where the labor are virtual slaves (if not real slaves).
No, we are not all "right & good" in the US. But it is not those that the Left and the media and all those Euro snobs point to here. The real bad in America are the Leftist, the Media and the globalist money-changer.
The problem with the rest of the world, i.e. Europe, Japan, S. Korea is you've had your lives subsidized by the US for so long (security, trade, health care, yes, your all probably going to have to pay more for your drugs now) and now that is going to change. We are tired of footing the bill. It is time you all grew up and started paying your own way.
I'm not sure about your analysis of Bell Telephone.
You are right that the "crown jewels" of Lucent were allowed to rust away, but something had to be done about the woeful state of the domestic telephone system, which was allowed to stagnate with no competition to force Bell to up it's game. Bell Labs was essentially well-funded by the excessive profits of the Bell monopoly, which hurt everyone else and mostly went in execs pockets anyway.
The result of the Bell breakup didn't stick, as successive US Governments looked away as the Baby Bells were re-combined into Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, etc. Who carefully don't compete at all.
"Huawei is China's version of Bell Labs. Back in the day Bell Labs and its manufacturing affiliate, Western Electric, dominated telecommunications with both basic research and product development. "
The difference is that Bell Labs existed as part of the 1930s antitrust settlements with the FTC and was legally obligated to exist
The "breakup of AT&T" has resulted in a reconsolidation of the aomeba into 2 parts (west/east of the mississippi) so that the FTC can't touch it, without the pesky "universal service for all" and R&D obligations which it can simply buy in like it used to prior to 1926
Huawei softly softly exiting Australasia. Long-time key sponsor of an Aussie NRL team gone last week / expect sponsorship of the Aussie prem football league to follow. Enterprise hardware orders in NZ put on hold / rescinded.
Was told earlier this year "no we can't supply firewalls in NZ" - errrrr ok.......
"In November 2018, New Zealand’s intelligence agency barred its largest telecommunications carrier, Sparc, from using Huawei equipment. Likewise, in December 2018, Japan excluded Huawei from its domestic communications infrastructure. Additionally, in August 2019, the Australian government announced a ban on Huawei equipment. We also note that communications service providers in other countries, including BT, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom, are acting to keep Huawei equipment out of their 5G networks."
-US Govt ppl
"And the US will «ban» and «sanction» you...."
Yup, even if you happen to be American and the creator of the original crude prototype mousetrap
Look at the treatment of Alvin Weinberg and the Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge - we could have had nuclear power several hundred times safer than it is now (Fukushima, Chernobyl, TMI, SL1, the Nuclear Ouchie, and the near miss at Diablo Canyon would have been impossble with this design), that's NOT dependant on the weapons industry(*) and would have been about 1/10 the cost to run, plus producing vastly less than 1% of the long term waste (which only needs 350 years and it's less radioactive than new LWR fuel!)
(*) U235 is a waste product of nuclear weapons production. The real weapons material is the depleted uranium as this is what's transmuted to plutonium for bombs or used directly as bomb casings to make the "boom go BOOM-BOOM". All the protesters around civil nuke plants and reprocessing sites miss the point that the real weapons stuff is nowhere near where they're protesting and the stuff they're protesting can never become weapons
I work for a large storage provider and a couple of years ago I was called by one of our key African customers to look at what was causing a performance spike on their storage array every day in the early hours of the morning that they could not explain.
We looked at server performance, batch jobs, and processes which were running at the time of the spikes and could find nothing which might be causing the issue.
As part of the RCA we failed the application over to its DR counterpart so that the offending host could be monitored. Sure enough at 2am (In Ethiopia in a dark and dingy DC - maximum fun) the spike happened again on a now quiet system.
After getting our egg head engineers involved they found it was something on the chipset hitting the storage and pulling off some kind of meta data and sending it to (at the time) unknown IP address in China.
The server in question was a Huawei machine and it has some kind of spy chip doing this.
The customer logged a case with the vendor and the machine was duly replaced without comment and without further spikes of sneaky IO subsystem activity.
I saw this with my own two blue eyes.
Is there any truth in the claims that Huawei are insecure, well yes.
All the Chinese people I've ever met, or ever known, are few in number. But each of them I found to be pleasant, civilised, and good humoured. That's not a description in any way applicable to the Chinese Communist Party, the self-serving self-perpetuating clique which dominates China to the extent that it IS China.
The sooner, then, the better that the West stops relying on cheap imports from China and starts re-industrializing. The only thing the repellent creatures at the top of the Chinese Communist Party actually understand is money. The only pressure they ever feel is that from Chinese businesses and industrialists who're losing money. So whilst I'm sorry for anyone who has lost their job at Huawei or is about to do so, I've no regrets about severing ties with a fundamentally corrupt country whose psychopathic leaders are only ever going to moderate their behaviour once the money begins to dry up.
Agreed re the kindness and civility of Chinese people but ultimately they are part of the problem. Unlike in the West many Chinese see an attack on their government as an attack on both them and their country. The old adage that 'people get the government that they deserve' still rings true.
Huh?
What about the USA? If a non-American criticises their administration, they often take it personally, with comments such as "You're country used just as bad. Butt out"
*1* This has never been the case with most Americans on here.
*2* Generally it's a lot better these days.. Probably because global criticism of trump is seen as justified.
"Unlike in the West many Chinese see an attack on their government as an attack on both them and their country."
Funnily enough, Brexiters take it about as personally, as do most religious zealots when their belifes are challenged
Nationalism wasn't even an issue in China until after Tianiamen square, It's been stoked up by the government as part of their policies.
Nationalism and the rise of right wing politics in other parts of the world go hand in hand with economic downturns
What needs to happen is that all Chinese businesses must partner up with a local company in a country they want to do business in that is not owned by the Chinese.
Just like all companies wanting to do business in China have to do.
I bet the Chinese Communist Party will have a hissy fit if that happened.
The next to go will be Huawei's smartphone business which will become completely uncompetitive if the sanctions against them aren't lifted. Without modern SoC's Huawei will quickly fall by the wayside since other Chinese companies face no such hurdles.
Who's gonna buy a Huawei smartphone with a 28nm SoC when they can buy another Chinese brand with a modern 5nm SoC?
They also don't have access to the Google play store. Which hurts now - despite them advertising how great their own app store is.
Mum's on a Huawei phone (as am I), but when it comes to upgrade time I'll be finding us both something else. Not that she uses that many apps - but it's enough when there are equally good phones at similar prices.
The restriction on Huawei seems to be on the usage by silicon foundries of US sourced software (and thus subject to US export licencing) in the design of chips and production control on their contracts with Huawei.
So the way around this will be to develop such programs which don't require US export licences.
Plus given how murky company ownership can be, Huawei could do a Nokia and 'exit' the phone business, so that some other entity (Microsoft in Nokia's case) can produce and sell 'Huawei' phones...
The real problem is that wafer steppers from ASML aren't allowed to be exported to China anymore.
That software snafu may also be part of the problem, but wafer steppers are much more difficult to copy. ASML spent the better part of a decade trying to perfect these machines and they have a virtual monopoly on them.
The argument is that Huawei are getting loads of effective subsidy to do R&D - which of course means they can charge less for their kit and out-compete their Western counterparts.
There's then further accusations that they're at risk of being pressured to put security backdoors in networking kit in everyone's telecoms system.
Security is of course a great excuse to use when all you're worried about is unfair trade - or even trade that's fair but uncomfortably effective.
However the security fears do precede Trump. The NSA were warning about them in Obama's administration and GCHQ were issuing similar warnings in Blighty. Though of course those two organisations are often joined at the hip, so you'd often expect both to sing the same song.
However those warnings aren't unique, as the French and Dutch intelligence services have made rude noises too - and it should be pointed out that after the British government changed its mind and strengthened its policy on Huawei last month, the French and Italians quietly followed suit. The Dutch are looking at it too - and I suspect a similar policy will ripple slowly across Europe - with the possible exception of Germany (where like the UK it became a more politicised issue and the government don't want to be seen to back down to Trump).
"There's then further accusations that they're at risk of being pressured to put security backdoors in networking kit in everyone's telecoms system."
Unlike say, Cisco, who've been SHOWN to have done so?
And let's not forget operation Ivy Bells, the USN Submarine Jimmy Carter or room 641A
Feel free to look them up. :)
As the UK winds down after no longer being anything...period, not just in Europe but anywhere, there is no point in Huawei even bothering with the uk or probably England. They are after investing in nice big juicy plumbs, not dried up prunes that are left on the shelf. England has to wake up and smell the coffee, driving a double decker bus down a block ended country lane is crass at the best of times, in a thick fog and in darkness reversing out is going to be at best a mess and also take years. No wonder Huawei is downsizing (getting out!)
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