Kevin Wolf Quoted by Washington Post, Wall Street Journal on Continued Fallout from U.S. Restrictions on Huawei

Akin Gump international trade partner Kevin Wolf has been quoted in major media outlets following the Commerce Department’s slight easing of restrictions against Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Last week, the Trump administration added Huawei to its “Entity List,” a trade blacklist forbidding U.S. companies from doing business with it unless they get special approval from the government. (Click here to learn more.)

According to The Washington Post article “Huawei supply ban roils stocks as U.S. companies begin to cut off China tech giant,” some transactions will now be allowed to continue for 90 days, enabling Huawei to receive U.S. equipment to service existing mobile phone users and rural broadband networks. Wolf said the reprieve was “very narrow,” however, adding that it is “not relief for exporters. It really is to prevent unintended operational problems with existing networks.”

In a similar vein, the U.S. government has also slowed the hiring by U.S. semiconductor companies of Chinese nationals. The Wall Street Journal reports that the disruption in the approval process has affected hundreds of jobs, hindering the ability to hire Chinese employees or move existing employees to certain projects in the United States. According to the article, the Commerce Department considers such assignments the equivalent of an export, since companies are giving foreigners knowledge about technology they could eventually take home.

Wolf said the differences in the pace of deemed-export approvals, as they are known, could reflect changed political circumstances, though changing technology could also be playing a role. If more applications involve especially sensitive technologies, the time it takes to process them could be longer.