Trump casts doubt on business with Huawei

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US President Donald Trump has cast doubt on the possibility of conducting any kind of business with Huawei right before his administration was set to announce whether it was extending a temporary reprieve of the ban on American companies buying the Chinese tech giant’s components. 

“Huawei is a company we may not do business with at all,” Efe news quoted Trump as saying to the media on Sunday before departing from Morristown, New Jersey. 

In his remarks, Trump insisted that the Chinese company was a threat to national security and said he would take a decision on the matter the following day. “So at this moment it looks like we are not going to do business, I don’t want to do business at all because it is a national security threat,” he added. 

He appeared to contradict his chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, who earlier in the day told NBC News that the Department of Commerce was considering extending the reprieve given to Huawei for another 90 days to allow it to continue conducting business with US companies. 

“We’re giving a break to our own companies for three months,” Kudlow said. 

In May, Washington had banned Huawei from selling its telecommunications equipment to American companies, alleging that the Chinese giant could use those systems for espionage. 

During the recent G20 summit in June, Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, agreed to a new truce in the ongoing trade war between their countries. 

Following the truce, Washington delayed the imposition of new tariffs on China and agreed to temporarily allow Huawei to sell small components, such as computer chips, to US companies. 

The reprieve on the ban for some of those products is set to expire on Monday. 

On July 22, executives of seven tech giants asked Trump to take a decision on Huawei’s trading activity in the US, the White House said in a statement at the time. 

That day, the US President met with executives from Google, Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, Micron, Broadcom and Western Digital at the White House to discuss the ban on Huawei. 

During the meeting, the tech companies’ executives requested that the Department of Commerce take “timely licensing decisions” regarding the restrictions on Huawei.