Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp (中興) has asked the US government to lift a ban on sales to the company, which threatens its survival and has added to trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.
The telecom equipment and handset maker said in a filing on Sunday that it had submitted a request to the US Department of Commerce for a stay of the export ban, along with supplemental information.
US officials imposed the ban because of what they said were false statements by the firm over action it claimed to have taken regarding the illegal sale of goods to Iran and North Korea. ZTE pleaded guilty to the charges in March last year and was fined US$1.2 billion.
The ban prohibits US companies from selling crucial hardware and software components to ZTE for seven years, with one Chinese investment bank estimating it had only one or two months’ supply of those items on hand.
Trading of ZTE shares in Hong Kong and Shenzhen has been halted since the US announcement last month.
The tough sanctions come as the battle over technology takes center stage in a US spat with China centering on trade and industrial policy.
Washington’s control of the company’s fate has stirred ire and angst in China and reinforced for Beijing the need to control all parts of the technological supply chain.
Separately, Taiwan last month announced that its companies needed to obtain export permits to ship “strategic high-tech commodities” to ZTE.
“The purpose is to check that the products are not meant for developing military weapons,” said a Bureau of Foreign Trade official, who declined to be named, adding that the extra precaution is in line with UN sanctions against Iran.
Handset chip designer Mediatek Inc (聯發科) last week received a permit to export to ZTE, the official said.
Beijing has been closely following the developments around ZTE, a company with 80,000 employees headquartered in southern China. Chinese officials last week asked a high-level US delegation to reconsider the ban during trade talks in Beijing.
China made “solemn representations with the US” — an official diplomatic protest — during the negotiations and secured a pledge from the trade team to relay the concerns to US President Donald Trump, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Friday last week.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by