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Huawei founder slams US and allegations of spying

The founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei has spoken out about the US and allegations of the company spying for the Chinese government in an interview with the BBC.

The interview comes after Zhengfei’s daughter and Huawei chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou was arrested.

According to the BBC the US is currently pursuing criminal charges including money laundering, bank fraud and stealing trade secrets against Huawei and Wanzhou.

Huawei has denied the allegations.

You might be aware that the US has called for a ban of Huawei which was followed by Australia and New Zealand. The UK was investigating the US’ claims as is Canada.

Speaking to the BBC, Zhengfei said, “The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit.”

Now it’s all well and good for a company’s founder to say they are advanced but are they really? Last year chief executive at Ericsson, Börje Ekholm, told the Financial Times that Huawei’s 5G equipment was more advanced than its competition.

Huawei has also faced allegations of spying on behalf of the Chinese government. The founder addressed these concerns during the interview.

“The Chinese government has already clearly said that it won’t install any backdoors. And we won’t install backdoors either,” said Zhengfei.

“Our company will never undertake any spying activities. If we have any such actions, then I’ll shut the company down.”

Speaking about the arrest of his daughter and the 23 charges levelled against her and Huawei, Zhengfei said that the act was “politically motivated and is not acceptable”.

“We object to this. But now that we’ve gone down this path, we’ll let the courts settle it,” said Zhengfei.

Just yesterday the UK said that any risks that might come as a result of using Huawei’s 5G tech could be mitigated and a ban of the firm was unnecessary. This comes after the US has tried to get more and more countries to ban the firm.

Here at home, well, there’s not much hoohah about Huawei. The firm provides telecommunication infrastructure for most (if not all) of the major mobile network providers and we believe that the firm’s tech is vital to an efficient rollout of 5G. In fact, we’d argue that a mix of tech from Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei is vital to insure we don’t lag too far behind the world as regards 5G deployment.

Huawei is also set to launch its first African data centre next month making a ban of the firm in South Africa incredibly unlikely.

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