US starts granting, denying some Huawei supply licenses

Bloomberg

The US Commerce Department has started approving some suppliers’ applications for licenses to do business with China’s Huawei Technologies Co, partially reopening access to one of the biggest buyers of US technology.
“We’ve had 290-something requests for specific licenses,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in an interview with Fox Business Network. “We’ve now been starting to send out the 20-day intent-to-deny letters and some approvals.”
In May, the US added Huawei to what’s known as the entity list in an effort to block US companies from selling components to China’s largest technology company, which it accuses of being a threat to America’s national security. Huawei has denied those claims.
The listing, which requires American firms to obtain a government license in order to sell to blacklisted entities, has hurt some US companies’ earnings and caused confusion as to what their relationship with their Chinese customer will be going forward.

Strategic Rival
The Trump administration’s curbs on the Chinese tech industry are part of its broader effort to contain Beijing’s rise as a strategic rival and economic superpower. The two nations are locked in trade talks aimed at reaching a truce after almost two years of negotiations and tariffs on some $500 billion of each other’s products.
At a meeting in early October, President Donald Trump told his team that some Huawei licenses could be issued for non-sensitive items, a person familiar with the meeting said, but Commerce waited until now to move on the directive.
It’s not clear which companies got approval to continue their business with Huawei and on what basis that decision was made. Asked about the breakdown of approvals and denials and what standard Commerce used to determine the outcome of requests, a Commerce Department spokesman only referred to Ross’s comments.
Some US chipmakers have argued that a blanket ban is ineffective because their products can easily be obtained from overseas rivals not subject to it. They’ve proposed resuming shipments of some goods that aren’t connected to security-related products and asked the administration to refine its stance and expedite the licensing process.
Trump promised chip company CEOs in a meeting over the summer that he would speed up the license approval process and again reiterated that promise after a meeting with Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan.
Amid the confusion, many companies have resumed partial shipments to Huawei.