The U.S. is considering ways to obstruct Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.'s lead in the telecom equipment space and to offer funds to its European rivals, Nokia Corp. and Ericsson, London's Financial Times reported, citing two sources.
The planned funding into Huawei's rivals is intended to allow them to compete with the financing terms the Chinese company offers its clients. China's state banks provide Huawei with multibillion-dollar credit lines, which allows the company to offer longer payment terms to clients, compared with its rivals.
Other government officials have proposed that U.S. companies, such as Oracle Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., enter the radio transmission segment to create a U.S.-based rival to Huawei. Both companies turned down the suggestion, citing costs and the time required in building radio transmission technologies.
The U.S. government is also considering offering incentives with the goal of motivating companies to invest in new 5G technologies, such as software that would allow equipment from different suppliers to communicate with each other. Such technology would lessen the reliance of telecom operators on a single vendor for a network build-out.
Government officials reached out to Massachusetts-based Altiostar Networks Inc., a company that creates such software, to look into how to support the idea. In return, the software company is requesting the government to demand hardware companies to allow their products to become accessible to Altiostar's software.
The U.S. government's recent considerations follow an earlier move to blacklist Huawei over perceived threats to the country's national security or foreign policy interest. U.S. President Donald Trump also said the U.S. will not do business with Huawei at least until a new trade deal is struck with China.
