A few days ago, President Trump made a surprise announcement that U.S. companies could sell their products to Huawei again after the Chinese company had been placed on the Department of Commerce's Entity List. That was big news for Huawei, but now it sounds like Huawei is still being blacklisted.
The Commerce Department told agents this week that Huawei is still on the Entity List, reports Reuters, and that a "presumption of denial" policy should be applied to blacklisted companies like Huawei. A presumption of denial means that if a company makes a license request to sell products to Huawei, it should be given a strict review. Most are not approved.
A trade ban was announced nearly two months ago that prevents U.S. companies from selling technology to Huawei. In the following weeks, several companies halted doing business with Huawei, including Qualcomm, Intel, and ARM. Google was also going to stop doing business with Huawei, which would mean that new Huawei phones could lack Google's Android apps and software updates could also be affected, but a temporary general license was granted to Huawei so that it could maintain existing devices.
Trump said at the G20 summit this past weekend that U.S. companies could sell their technologies to Huawei after he and Chinese President Xi Jinping came to an agreement. No other details on the announcement were given at the time, though, and now it looks like Huawei and its U.S. business partners will have to continue to wait before they can resume doing business.
