U.S. stops granting export licenses for China’s Huawei – sources

Jan 30 (Reuters) – The Biden administration is set to block licenses for US companies to export most goods to China's Huawei, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Huawei has faced US export restrictions for 5G and other technologies for several years, but US Commerce Department officials have granted some US firms licenses to sell certain goods and technologies to the company. Qualcomm Inc (qcom.io) In 2020, Huawei was allowed to sell 4G smartphone chips.

A Commerce Department spokeswoman said officials “continually assess our policies and regulations” but would not comment on negotiations with specific companies. Huawei and Qualcomm declined to comment. Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported the move earlier.

A person familiar with the matter said US officials are drawing up a new formal policy of denial for shipping items to Huawei that would include items below the 5G level, including 4G items, Wifi 6 and 7, artificial intelligence and high-performance Computing and cloud are included. Belongings.

Another person said the move was expected to build on a tightening of the Biden administration's policy on Huawei over the past year. The person said that licenses for 4G chips that could not be used for 5G, which may have been approved earlier, were being denied. Towards the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden administration, authorities still granted licenses to specific items for 4G applications.

US authorities placed Huawei on a trade blacklist in 2019, limiting most US suppliers from shipping goods and technology to the company unless they were licensed. Authorities continued to tighten controls to curtail Huawei's ability to buy or design the semiconductor chips that power most of its products.

But US officials granted licenses that allowed Huawei to obtain some products. For example, Huawei's suppliers received licenses worth $61 billion to sell to the telecoms equipment giant. April to November 2021,

In December, Huawei said its total revenue was about $91.53 billion, down slightly from 2021 when US sanctions caused its sales to drop by about a third.

Reporting by Chhavi Mehta in Bengaluru, Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Alexandra Alper and Karen Freifeld in Washington; Additional reporting by David Kirton in Shenzhen; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Stephen Coates

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