US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said his country is close to signing a deal with China that could lead to an easing of some trade restrictions.

Scott Bicheno

November 4, 2019

1 Min Read
US on the verge of signing some kind of trade deal with China

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said his country is close to signing a deal with China that could lead to an easing of some trade restrictions.

Ross (pictured) said as much to Bloomberg, with the usual caveats about nothing being set in stone. Many media have been reporting their own conjecture about what this could mean for Huawei as fact, but Ross was keen to stress this deal doesn’t affect the ‘entity list’, which prevents US companies doing business with Huawei.

There was some couched optimism about licenses being granted, that would enable specific companies to conduct specific trade with Huawei, but then again the US has been sitting on a bunch of license applications for a while without apparently granting any. Arguable the biggest of these would be one that allows Google and Huawei to work together, thus enabling the latter to install the full version of Android on its phones.

It’s all very well for Ross to insist the entity list and the trade war are unrelated, but US foot-dragging over granting those licenses implies the contrary. Trade wars are a game of chicken in which each side raises the stakes to give them more weight in negotiations. Putting national champion Huawei in existential danger via the entity list is just too convenient a negotiating chip for its to be plausible that the two issues are unrelated.

 

About the Author(s)

Scott Bicheno

As the Editorial Director of Telecoms.com, Scott oversees all editorial activity on the site and also manages the Telecoms.com Intelligence arm, which focuses on analysis and bespoke content.
Scott has been covering the mobile phone and broader technology industries for over ten years. Prior to Telecoms.com Scott was the primary smartphone specialist at industry analyst Strategy Analytics’. Before that Scott was a technology journalist, covering the PC and telecoms sectors from a business perspective.
Follow him @scottbicheno

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