Huawei, SMIC Suppliers Received Billions Worth of Licenses For US Goods

Suppliers to Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and China's top chipmaker SMIC got billions of dollars worth of licenses from November through April to sell them goods and technology despite their being on a U.S. trade blacklist, documents released by Congress showed on Thursday. Reuters reports: According to the documents, first obtained by Reuters, 113 export licenses worth $61 billion were approved for suppliers to ship products to Huawei while another 188 licenses valued at nearly $42 billion were greenlighted for Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC). The data also showed that more than 9 out of 10 license applications were granted to SMIC suppliers while 69% of requests to ship to Huawei were approved over the same period.

[T]he Commerce Department said that the release of an 'arbitrary snapshot' of license approvals 'risks politicizing the licensing process and misrepresenting the national security determinations' made by the government. It also stressed that approved license applications do not represent actual shipments and around half of all licenses are used. It added that license applications involving Huawei and SMIC are processed under policies developed by the Trump administration and maintained by the Biden administration.

A former senior Commerce Department official in the Trump administration who declined to be named echoed the agency's view. 'This very small period of license activity is not an accurate window into the Huawei and SMIC license process,' he said, noting that the goal of preventing the companies from obtaining leading edge technology without unnecessarily harming U.S. exports of other goods had been successful. 'This [document release] seems designed to mislead people and generate headlines,' he added.

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