Huawei Billionaire Dangles 5G Secrets to Create a U.S. Foe

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei is ready to license his 5G technology only to one other company and he wants that potential arch-rival to be American, according to Bloomberg.

Ren reiterated an offer to license out Huawei’s full portfolio of 5G wireless technology, which would include chip designs, hardware and source code, to a single, exclusive licensee. That should be a U.S. company because Europe is home to close competitors like Nokia and Ericsson and doesn’t need help to compete, he added.

“We would like to offer an exclusive license to one company from the West so that it’s able to achieve economies of scale to support a business,“ Ren said in a live-streamed discussion with visiting foreign academics. “With this one company, I think it should be a U.S. company.“

Critics charge that intellectual property theft from the likes of Cisco and Motorola helped Huawei vault into the upper echelons of telecommunications providers, while Ren and his executives credit years of investment and research. Huawei is on track to produce 600,000 base stations this year and 1.5 million of those the next. The company can make it happen without American components but it would prefer buying from U.S. suppliers, Ren said.

“As time goes by, trust levels will increase,“ he said during a discussion with Stanford lecturer Jerry Kaplan and fellow academic Peter Cochrane. “If we’re talking about a tech decoupling or separate governance, I don’t think it’s possible.“