Huawei fully prepared for US government ban, will not be ‘beaten to death’

Huawei, the world's 5G technology leader, will not be "beaten to death" by the US government despite Washington's current efforts to blacklist and suffocate the Chinese high-tech company, said Ren Zhengfei, Huawei's founder and chief executive officer.

Huawei is likely to witness its growth momentum to slow down in coming two years, with its sales in 2019 and 2020 to hover around $100 billion, compared to $130 billion sales in 2018, Ren told a panel discussion in Shenzhen, which was live-streamed on Monday.

Under strict ban ordered by the Trump administration, many US chip-makers and software companies like Google have cut off supplies to Huawei, which will negatively impact Huawei's devices sales, market analysts say.

Meanwhile, industry representatives hinted that the company will soon unveil a new chipset while welcoming more app developers to its own Android platform, as part of its resistance measures to counter US sanctions.

However, Ren told a panel discussion with two renowned American thinkers in Shenzhen, headquarters of Huawei that the "restrictive measures of the US government will not be a big hindrance in our way."

US companies have business integrity and ethics, and in the past 30 years, Huawei has been dependent upon and supported by the American partners, Ren said. He admitted that it was beyond his imagination that the US government would be "so determined to cripple" his company that Washington went too far to take "so extreme and wide-range measures" to achieve its goals of straggling Huawei.

Huawei will see its output cut by about 30 percent in the next two years, down by about $30 billion, the founder said. "We'll see some switchovers in the next two years, and it will take time to see how it is working out."

The Chinese tech giant has not been waiting passively for the Trump administration to lift the ban, Ren said. Besides working on core technologies like self-developed high-end chipsets, Huawei has also been actively testing its homegrown operating system called HongMeng OS.

Huawei's chip arm HiSilicon will soon launch a new type of processor, Kirin 810, which will also be included in the upcoming nova 5 devise, scheduled for release on Friday.

The 7nm chipset will largely be an upgrade from the previous Kirin 710 by working with TSMC, which will be enhanced in both CPU and GPU designs, a source close to the matter confirmed with the Global Times on Monday.

Some media reports suggested, on Monday, that Huawei is preparing for a 40 to 60 percent fall in overseas smartphone shipments following the strict ban imposed by the US government. "Our phone shipments to the international market are likely to drop by 40 percent, but we will see very robust growth in the Chinese home market," Ren said to the panel.

"The future is all about cooperation," he added.