US stops granting export licenses for China's Huawei: Sources

The Biden administration has stopped approving licenses for UScompanies to export most items to China'sHuawei, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Huaweihas faced USexport restrictions around items for 5G and other technologies for several years, but officials in the USDepartment of Commerce have granted licenses for some American firms to sell certain goods and technologies to the company. Qualcomm Inc in 2020 received permission to sell 4G smartphone chips toHuawei.

A Commerce Department spokesperson said officials "continually assess our policies and regulations" but do not comment on talks with specific companies.Huaweiand Qualcomm declined to comment. Bloomberg and the Financial Times earlier reported the move.

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Also Read |Huawei registers plateaued revenue growth, US sanctions impact wanes

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that China opposes the United States abusing an overly broad notion of national security to suppress Chinese firms unreasonably.

The move "goes against the principles of the market economy and rules of international trade and finance, hurts the confidence the international community has in the US business environment and is blatant technological hegemony," Mao said during a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.

One person familiar with the matter said USofficials are creating a new formal policy of denial for shipping items toHuaweithat would include items below the 5G level, including 4G items, Wifi 6 and 7, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing and cloud items.

Another person said the move was expected to reflect the Biden administration's tightening of policy onHuaweiover the past year. Licenses for 4G chips that could not be used for 5g, which might have been approved earlier, were being denied, the person said. Toward the end of the Trump administration and early in the Biden administration, officials had still granted licenses for items specific to 4G applications.

American officials placedHuaweion a trade blacklist in 2019 restricting most USsuppliers from shipping goods and technology to the company unless they were granted licenses. Officials continued to tighten the controls to cut offHuawei's ability to buy or design the semiconductor chips that power most of its products.

But USofficials granted licenses that allowedHuaweito receive some products. For example, suppliers toHuaweigot licenses worth $61 billion to sell to the telecoms equipment giant from April through November 2021.

In December,Huaweisaid its overall revenue was about $91.53 billion, down only slightly from 2021 when USsanctions caused its sales to fall by nearly a third.

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