After six weeks of uncertainty, US President Donald Trump has lifted the ban on Huawei, and US companies can continue selling products to the Chinese tech giant “for the time being.”
The announcement was made a little over an hour ago during a press conference at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Mr Trump said that the decision came after a “very good meeting” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the two countries will “be continuing to negotiate” trade matters.
“One thing I will allow is that – a lot of people are surprised that we sell to Huawei a tremendous amount of products that go to various products they make. And I said that is okay.” Mr Trump said.
“We are going to continue selling those products. These are American companies producing the products. This is complex, highly scientific. We are the only one with the technology. I have agreed to allow them to continue selling the products.”
This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. While companies like Google did comply with the ban, they also advised against it, warning that Huawei creating their own OS would pose an even bigger threat to national security.
Needless to say, this is very good news for both Huawei and its users — the threat of their phones losing access to Google’s apps is now a moot point (though Huawei might still want to continue developing their proprietary HongMeng OS to prevent something like this from happening again), and perhaps the release of their Matebook line of laptops can finally get back on track too.
Header Image Credit: Reuters