Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor
scmp.com
scmp.com
Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that assembles handsets products for many phone brands including Apple and Xiaomi, has stopped several production lines for Huawei phones in recent days as the Shenzhen company reduced orders for new phones, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named as the information is private.
I assume each model is made on more than one production line in parallel, so the quote above seems to imply that production didn't stop completely, but capacity was reduced.
The ban is great for U.S. companies in the short term that are behind on 5G, but this will harm U.S. tech industry interests in the long term once China has that vertical stack up and running.
I wish the U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.
I don't think there's a country that has issued a complete ban comparable to the US, and most European countries will probably purchase 5G tech from Huawei for parts of their networks.
These really basic maintenance tasks aren't happening, leaving cell networks vulnerable to anyone who can be bothered to look up a CVE and run the provided demo exploit code. Hard to maintain a network you can't secure :c
it's reasonable to think that regardless of their SSL implementation, you should assume that the network owner is going to try and spy on your traffic and sell it to the highest bidder
Telcom security is a mess, but the frontline gear is usually the saving grace of the network.
There could be TLS involved in higher level protocols like IMS though. Or not. Does anyone know if eg VoLTE relies on the network for security or does it run SIP over DTLS or something?
Problem is, really basic maintenance tasks like updating OpenSSL aren't happening on Huawei's existing cellular basestations, leaving cell networks vulnerable to anyone who can be bothered to look up a CVE and run the provided demo exploit code. Hard to maintain a network you can't secure :c
https://hmgstrategy.com/resource-center/articles/2019/04/04/...
Weren't they already doing this?
To address your comment- yes, they already do that, but because of loopholes, they probably won't have to develop a full stack.
Correction, this has been China's plan all along. This skizm is just speeding up the process.
If China would open their economy to US companies in the same way the US was open to China pre-trade-war, then things could work.
As it stands China makes no secret about their desire to displace the US as the world's leading superpower, they've proven time and again they'll exploit any openings we give them toward that end. They don't want win-win scenarios, they want China-win-everyone-else-lose scenarios. It's long past time we stopped negotiating in good faith with bad actors.
They didn't.
If Chinese products are so yellow-star-spangled awesome, then why not let their citizens choose freely between Chinese and foreign products?
Free trade is a two way street.
There are plenty of choices between domestic and foreign products in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Jxci7d8UM
On the other hand, good luck getting a Chinese smartphone in the US now. Better pony up your $1K+ for Tim Cook.
It is well understood that the ability of foreign companies to do business in China is extremely constrained. Considering that the topic is Android, it seems worth noting that basically every Google service is blocked in China by the Great Firewall.
In other words, TPP.
What Trump has done is ripping the covers off the whole machinery, not only in domestic politics but also US international relations, down to the naked ugly cores.
Also last I checked Foxconn bought quite a bit of property in Wisconsin, even if they strangely haven't done much with it. Could a US company buy (and by buy I mean get one of those multi-decade leases, since the CCC technically owns all the land) property in China?
The US is far from the Captain America ideal, but from a trade perspective we've been a lot more fair with China than they have been with us.
On the other hand, the US isn't currently occupying, detaining, and requiring patriotic reeducation for an ethnic minority within its borders.
I feel like an "It's already happening, and this is what you get" appraisal cuts less favorably towards China than the US.
Let's just ignore that the US is still running torture black-sites to this day and droning people all over the planet often based on nothing more than metadata and questionable ML algorithms [0] because that's what "the US spying on the world" is mostly about: State-sponsored assassinations and abductions.
That's why the US doesn't exactly occupy a moral high-ground on these issues, the only reason many US Americans think they are is that they've bought into the "only protecting you from the next 9/11" narrative, which is exactly the same narrative the Chinese government is peddling to its own citizens to justify its own measures: "Fighting terrorists, keeping the country save".
A cynic could now try to measure the bad vs the worse, but the reality remains that both are committing crimes against humanity on a regular basis and both justify them in exactly the same ways.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
No they don't give a shit about that. The US cares about other nations spying on their businesses and commercial interests and losing dominance of leading network technology to a foreign country which would then be the leader of said technology and the US would fall further and further behind and completely lose dominance like Europe lost dominance to the US due to WWII.
The networking business would never recover from that. Huawei has shown China can lead in something, the US wants to kill that idea and wants China to assume the position of Japan which leads in none of the tech despite having a sizable way to do that in the 80s.
The best way to deal with it is to mirror what Google did with Android by forking it and setting up a group of 20,000 engineers to work on that fork and making that community driven and open source available to any company that wants to develop on the platform... so due to the privacy concerns that competing technology destroys Google's dominance on mobile... maybe even makes a dent against Apple's privacy play. While they do that they should also drop the Great Chinese Firewall. Fork Chrome. And adopt Capitalist democracy.
This isn't gaslighting. To even approach gaslighting it would require me blaming China's tendencies to do the same sort of economic move for the US doing this. This is a realistic view of the world and a likely positive outcome for Americans and other westerners.
The argument that poorer countries need a certain level of protectionism in order to develop isn't new (it goes back at least to Alexander Hamilton), but as China has developed, it has reduced barriers to entry for foreign firms. There's a wide gulf between how China is discussed in the United States and the reality.
We ran the Marshall plan once upon a time, now we just spend our fortune fighting wars in backwaters.
You're gonna hate on the Chinese for doing the sort of things we should have been doing?
The belt and road project in particular was not supposed to raise any negative emotions about China at all, it was meant to demonstrate that China does have an interest in expanding it's economic power, as indicated in my original comment.
To the extent that I raised moral issues with China (that was the part about concentration camps) the point was that we should expect them to not use this economic power based on some sort of principle of fairness.
I'd also be careful with the use of the word Chinese, since it applies both to the country and to the people. The vast majority of Chinese people are perfectly nice normal people, just like every other large ethnic group really.
As far as China/Chinese, we're the exception in terms of not being an ethnostate. France, Ireland, Israel.. the west is full of them. It's mostly just the places that the west carved up that aren't ethnostates.
Personally, I'm not in favor of anthropomorphizing nation-states, I think it obscures the fact that people and politics are behind everything.
As for supporting them, in the abstract sense of "their ours" and in which I support the leafs (terrible hockey team that people from Toronto feel obliged to support), probably so. That doesn't mean that the people (especially in China) are responsible for the governments actions, that they would do the same thing given a choice, that I feel the same towards the two entities, etc.
If you're not in favor of anthropomorhpizing nation states translate "China's actions" to "The current Chinese government's actions" and not "The general population of China's actions"
For what it's worth, as a Canadian, we all already know how dependent we are on the US.
The problem is with building a competitive stack, Huawei can't get access to a 7nm fab in China, nor is their talent skilled in working with the limitations of said newer process, which kneecaps their ability to build chips competitive with Qualcomm and Apple.
Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM license revocation and Qualcomm's inability to license them cellular patents under FRAND during this dispute, TSMC is unlikely to fab IP infringing chips.
If TSMC were to fab these chips, their other 7nm clients (primarily Apple, followed by ARM licensees Qualcomm & AMD (which uses ARM TrustZone)) would all be in an uproar as ARM would likely prohibit the use of their designs at TSMC fabs.
Wrt China building their own 7nm fab, it is very unlikely they will get it off the ground in the next few years. Only TSMC & Samsung have succeeded in this, Intel, Global Foundries (formerly AMD) and many others have spent tens of billions and half a decade trying to build better than 14nm processes to no avail.
yet
> Huawei can build 7nm chips at TSMC, but due to their ARM l
ARM -> RISC, as ARM is not the only game in town. For example, at the moment I am having a lot of fun with a Unielec u7621 board (2 mini PCIe, mSata and USB3 with hardware accelerated NAT to handle 1Gbps) that costed me about $45 : https://openwrt.org/toh/unielec/u7621-06
I would love to see MIPS64 SOCs with a few GBs of RAM to replace my raspberries
All of the MT7621"s speed is from ASICs that accelerate NAT & WPA2, without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along.
More competitive offerings like the OrangePi PC Plus ($19) and FriendlyARM boards based on Allwinner chips offer much nore performance for the dollar, but these are literally foriegn IP blocks Allwinner licensed, glued together and sent off to a 45n or 28nm fab to have manufactured. Most of the work Allwinner did for these chips was on a trashcan ready, buggy board support package.
Yes, I'm having a lot offun with a 14 year old CPU, so I want to see a modern one, if possible with free software GPU support like for the Mali
> without that silicon external to the CPU, any kind of crypto would slowly chug along
Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.
The Mali drivers that were just mainlined last month aren't necessarily feature complete like Intel, Via or AMD GPU drivers. Mali is licensed from ARM, which would be a showstopper for US embargoed companies.
> Which is exactly why I want to see MIPS64 that can do all that without hardware acceleration - and much more with it.
If MIPS64 were competitive on price, we would have a plethora of tablets & boards based on it. Currently, dated Mips 24k cores are a $0.10 afterthought that is used to boot and initialize the dedicated ASICs. We've started seeing ARM cores eat the router market though, they're likely delivering more performance for that $0.10.
Eventually, something that is not licensed from a western company (or which can't be protected by IP law) but that is fast enough for most uses will also become a $0.10 afterthought.
The mips24k is remarkable in that you can comfortably run a linux kernel with a lot of userland utilities and even text mode software -- just what we used to run on Linux computers many years ago!
It is still the world is free trade to china but not other way round. With that strategy agreed by ours, china will win forever. QED.
The lack of an app store is a problem unique to China that led to WeChat and similar becoming omnibus apps, doing many things moderately well. This isn't a problem in most other countries, as our govts don't block Google Play and FDroid.
That's exactly what the UK did. It's called the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC).
Here's the latest (public) annual report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The stronger China becomes, the closer India will get to US and Japan. It's a geo-political compulsion.
>>U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.
Not in this iteration of world where spycraft is part and parcel of nation-state functions.
Hardware, they might dominate but for that to happen they need to have a solid alternative to the US based services.
MS could have had a chance, but they didn't have the vision and Android was the better choice (until now) to most manufacturers
Microsoft’s Windows Phone would have been no better, quite the contrary, at least you can fork Android, at least it supports alternative app stores.
The trade war is not why this company, in particular, is blacklisted.
To see no relation to the trade war is, however, a tad naive.
In practice, it's clearly a trade war thing and I'd be willing to bet quite a bit that there was a personal thing between Huawei's loudmouth CEO and our vindictive president.
Only in the last couple years have people gotten upset and started calling them cheaters or whatever, retroactively.
It raises some questions. Are we blaming them for our inability to socialize our gains from trade? Were we expecting them to never learn and move up the value chain?
Sure, most people have a bias or a slant, and it often comes out in what we write, but do you honestly think anyone who sees you are a brand new account and sees your comments here will think anything other than 'insert_country_here apologist'? And that it happens on every story critical of china? Seriously it gets old.
It's not cool to accuse people of being Chinese shills, especially people with semi-obscure Greek names that they're very much in character of.
Now, almost two decades later, after Huawei has spent billions in R&D and appears to be the market leader in 5G, all these old claims resurface, and the US government is quite openly trying to drive them out of business. Of course, by sheer coincidence, this happens while Trump is waging a trade war against China.
And for the record, Diogenes couldn't be a shill for anyone. Diogenes is happy living in his barrel in the market, do he clearly isn't motivated by money.
I googled that Cisco case as well. One of their big claims was a copypasted impl of... strcmp.
Um, from the interviews I’ve been reading Ren has been nothing but gracious and well spoken.
He thanks all the US companies that have helped him and urges his compatriots to not “retaliate” because the US companies need to follow US laws.
I'm just noticing that Huawei is conspicuously singled out, and Trump is the kind of guy to do that over some petty personal slight.
Which companies? Why would Samsung and other non-China based smartphone makers feel the need to do this?
Also switching away from Android because of the risk of being blacklisted by the US is akin to rebuilding the foundation of your house when it's built on mud. If you get blacklisted by the US losing access to android seems to be the least of your problems.
This attempt by the US to express power economically over... what is China at this point? A cheap and under-regulated labor pool for US consumers? Regardless, this attempt will continue to weaken the economic and diplomatic utilities that the US has available, at least when it is led by nationalistic political leaders.
They make cellphones, we make self-owns.
But I agree, seems likely parent meant own-goal.
edit: Why the downvotes? As an EU citizen, I'm directly affected by this, and I very much do not like the idea of the EU towing the Five Eyes line to further fascilitate US foreign policy interests.
We very much would like to make our own decisions in our own interests and not have all our policies decided and forced upon us by the biggest brother on the planet.
In that context, I doubt the EU is gonna let itself get dictated what to do by the UK, which is in the process of leaving said EU. It would be like eating your cake and still having it.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/bvj3o7/eu_legislati...
Jolla is not much B2C anymore, mostly B2B now.
I guess the "Chinese dream" is over.
These brands are super popular in China, India, Vietnam and rest of South East Asia.
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/bbk-second-l...
I thought the problem is that basically all the cell networks run on huawei
[1]: https://reason.com/2019/05/15/trumps-malignant-mercantilism/
You don't need this qualifier. Our leaders don't care about the opinions of us, their subjects, either.
As far as we know, apple has very much not built the decryption tech the govt wants. And we are reasonably sure this is true because of the persistence of vendors selling cracks.
I'm sure there are other examples too.
So I don't really see Huawei and apple/Google/Intel as at all the same.
But it does go to show that, the majority of manufacturers who make their products in China need to tread lightly even more so now. If anything, this move by the US will make electronic manufacturers take a second thought about where the source their parts and (more importantly) which companies they deal with.
This icludings big companies like Microsoft and Google. I have no doubt that this could potentially hurt Googgl especially.
If it affects current gen smartphones could it also affect current gen 5g equipment?
This would mean hauwei is essentially dead in the water.
"The United States last week blocked Huawei from buying goods made from 25% or more of U.S.-originated technologies or materials"
The irony is that that is exactly what western companies blame China for.
This is one possible outcome. Another is that China learns to be a bit less self-serving and more cooperative with the rest of the world.
> Because the message this sends to the bigger world is: don't get too successful or we will kill your business.
That seems like a bit of a biased interpretation. Do you believe the US is literally trying to kill Huawei, or might it be possible that this is a negotiating tactic to get them to realize and acknowledge the value they receive from the rest of the world generously trading with them, by demonstrating the consequences of what happens when someone treats them in the way they treat the rest of the world (I am referring to access to their markets)?
> The irony is that that is exactly what western companies blame China for.
In the Alanis Morissette sense maybe.
Because they have such a great example given by USA to follow.
Any proposition starting with the phrase "the irony is that..." is likely to be an atrocity against the concept of irony. Irony is a property of communication, not of situations. Irony is the rhetorical quality of communicating multiple messages to multiple audiences. Irony is not "coincidence", so it would not apply to a "USA did X and China did X" situation.
However, in this case, what China is doing doesn't matter. The public communications of USA elites are heard by multiple audiences. Their subjects are meant to understand "China is dangerous; the world is dangerous; fear everything; don't question the military-industrial complex; don't question the popular news media; we should always be at war." Their fellow elites in China are meant to understand "Representative government is a sham; we are not constrained by our subjects; if we want to deprive our subjects of access to your products we will; also fuck you."
Both audiences are getting those messages loud and clear. Isn't it ironic?
ARM is a british company owned by a Japanese group. Them getting involved must sting much harder than Qualcomm.
They will run out of components.
They need licenses to manufacture and sell phones in China. Even with all the problems with their IP enforcement, China is not total IP outlaw. They follow the basic rules.
They are back in now.
The problem with competition is, although it's good for the consumer, it hurts the business. So if you have to choose between battling for number one or getting reduced from number 2/3 to number 10, the latter might be the cheaper option. And then you can use the saved resources to compete in the fight that really matters.
That's fighting spirit. I wish in the west we could see any of this. Instead we see bickering on all political fronts.
The Chinese gov't doesn't abide by any of these rules, nor do they enforce them, and subsequently Chinese companies are run the same way. That's not even getting in the espionage and the links between Huawei and the CPC.
Name one.
As for the IP angle, what evidence do you have that Huawei in particular built their 5G, or phones off IP theft? I postulate that as soon as China passes the US in development of new IP, the US will find no shortage of excuses to politically interfere in the market... Just like it is doing now, actually.
A nebulous, ill-defined hand-waved general accusation, with no clear goalposts, that infers that there's an intersection between the company's past or present employees, and past or present employees, executives, or advisers in government, that the company at some point received government seed funding, investments, or government contracts, that secret meetings take place between the company, and the government, that the company is a special contractor for the government, building custom solutions for it, or that the company may be compromised by government meddling.
The beauty of accusing a company of having close ties with its government is that it can mean almost anything you want it to mean.
I'm open to the idea, what evidence would you propose supports this?
Apple?
And if these specifics don't satisfy you, we all know that the Department of Defense was heavily involved with Silicon Valley since day 1. I'll wiggle my eyebrows vaguely, but suggestively at this fact, and let the audience draw its own conclusions, about the close relationship that the US Government has with SV tech firms.
I also find your eyebrow-wiggling an egregious rhetorical sin, employed only by those who have nothing more concrete to offer. Do you have anything at all to justify your vague insinuation that all of Silicon Valley is a giant government conspiracy?
Apple-NSA collaboration with PRISM. [2]
USDS & 18F involvement: [3][4]
Secret collaboration on tax burden reduction. (It's a longer word for 'lobbying'. If you think it's not secret, please share with me the minutes from those meetings. If you think it's not collaborative, why do these meetings always result in tax burden reductions for the lobbyists?) [5][6]
2 million dollars in direct campaign contributions, in 2018. It seems that to do business, you need to grease a few palms, eh? [7]
You cannot operate a multi-billion dollar company in the US, and not have close ties with the US government.
Not to mention the large number of congressmen, senators, and government advisers who, among their tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, have large financial stakes in Apple.
[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-revolving-door-appl...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/apple-nsa/
[3] https://www.fedscoop.com/civic-leave-white-house-technology-...
[4] https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/20/one-year-in-and-looking-forwa...
[5] https://www.macobserver.com/news/in-2018-apple-spent-6-6-mil...
[6] https://www.fastcompany.com/40502636/big-techs-lobbying-splu...
[7] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754
I can't believe there's a different view to it. Because the government could have stepped in for so many other issues but they cherry pick the one that will blow a competitor to US brands out of the water.
Which government are you talking about? I'm assuming the Chinese (?), but you left it unclear.
You might also find these links helpful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
the trademarks, patents, contracts, and license enforcements are broken, and China/Huawei shows how much better technology can be made without them. The free market chose Huawei, a company without patent and trade distortions