The US blacklisting of Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and other top Chinese tech companies is making it trickier for some mobile industry professionals to get down to business.
The today-to-Friday Mobile World Congress Shanghai, China’s largest forum for the mobile industry, is scheduled to start amid almost daily salvos from US President Donald Trump’s administration aimed at Huawei and other technology companies in the world’s largest mobile phone market.
US-Chinese tensions are escalating just as carriers around the world choose equipment vendors for the 5G networks expected to support technologies from remote surgery to automated factories and self-driving vehicles.
“It’s quite a sensitive moment,’’ said William Chou (周錦昌), managing partner of Deloitte Private in Beijing, and a scheduled speaker at the conference’s key Global Device Summit session.
He said it is unlikely that Huawei and ZTE Corp (中興通訊) will want to show off all their latest devices at the show given how the perception that they are ahead of global rivals has fueled tension.
The focus would instead be on 5G applications and how the vastness of China’s market is likely to drive development, Chou said.
The Shanghai event is modeled after a bigger annual industry show in Barcelona, Spain.
This year’s gathering in Spain was also squarely focused on Huawei and China, a nod to the country’s rising global importance and to how the Washington-Beijing dispute is creasing the business environment.
“The danger for international companies, especially American companies, is that they are ceding these opportunities to influence the marketplace to non-American companies, which can have knock-on consequences that could be far greater than some had anticipated,” said Jake Saunders, a vice president at ABI Research, and a scheduled speaker and moderator at the conference.
As delegates and speakers head to Shanghai, Huawei is said to be preparing for smartphone shipments outside China to drop by 40 million to 60 million this year.
Still, the Shanghai show is on track as planned to draw more than 60,000 attendees from more than 110 countries and territories along with about 550 companies, GSMA, the industry group that produces the event, said in an e-mail.
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