‘Trump’s tech spat is about taking 5G lead’

Bloomberg

For Paul Boudre, US president Donald Trump’s push against Chinese telecommunications companies is less about espionage than the race for technological supremacy.
Boudre, the chief executive officer of Soitec, a French maker of semiconductor materials that go into 5G equipment, automobiles, cloud computing and IT infrastructure, says Trump’s actions are aimed primarily at allowing American firms to catch up.
“Trump’s kick in the pants for companies is to wake them up and to catch up,” Boudre said in an interview in Paris. “Trump is the emissary saying that if nothing is done, we’ll be blown away. That’s why he’s been trying to put a brake on the advances that China has made.”
With the “everything-connected” era well under way, the race for a technological edge is intensifying. Trump has repeated railed against China and its companies, including Huawei Technologies Co, citing industrial espionage and intellectual property theft. He has limited their access to the US market and to American suppliers, while also pressing allies from Japan to The Netherlands to review policies towards the Asian giant.
The executive push and the infrastructure policy are driving US companies like Cisco, Qorvo Inc, Skyworks Solutions to accelerate their research, Boudre said.