As Huawei’s battles in the US snare its founder’s daughter, a new front is opening up across the pond – in France, reports Bloomberg.
The country, which has safeguards in place for critical parts of its telecoms networks, is considering adding items to its “high-alert” list that tacitly targets Huawei. The tipping of France into unfriendly territory for Huawei comes as the Chinese company confronts bans in the US, Japan, Australia and New Zealand and Germany intensifies scrutiny.
Bloomberg News spoke with 15 people with knowledge of President Emmanuel Macron’s push for significantly tighter regulation. As French phone companies start seeking suppliers to build out 5G networks, parts of the country’s telecoms infrastructure is being made inaccessible to Huawei through legal and regulatory revisions – many classified.
France’s largest telecoms operator, Orange, won’t use Huawei equipment in its 5G network in the country because of “a call to prudence by French authorities,” Chief Executive Officer Stephane Richard said Thursday in a radio interview. “There’s the fantasy, in the sense that they’re Chinese, they are spies; but there’s also the principle of precaution,” Richard said.
Two other French operators, Bouygues Telecom and Altice’s SFR, say they’ll look to directives from France’s National Agency for the Security of Information Systems, or Anssi, on 5G suppliers.
Anssi is demanding full access to potential suppliers’ technology: motherboards, original mapping of the item, encryption keys and the lines of code – in short, their industrial secrets. Such demands are only going to increase, four of the people said. Unlike Nokia Oyj, Cisco Systems Inc. and Ericsson AB, Huawei hasn’t submitted its equipment for vetting to become certified for critical components. That de-facto disqualifies it.
The loss of market access in the euro-area’s second-largest economy would be yet another blow for Huawei after a string of bans and troubles, the most recent being the arrest of its chief financial officer, who’s billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei’s 46-year-old daughter. Meng Wanzhou, accused by the US of guiding global efforts to mask violations of sanctions on sales to Iran, languished in a Canadian jail for over ten days this month before gaining bail.
Although Huawei, which sells smartphones, network equipment such as antennas, routers, and software for virtual networks in the French market, doesn’t break its revenue down by country, it calls France one of its “most important markets.” Europe, Middle-East and Africa last year brought in 27 percent of total sales compared with 6.5 percent in the Americas.