Huawei is preparing to come back to Europe. The company will debut the following year with its first factory in France dedicated to producing equipment for mobile phone networks. It is an investment on which not all governments in the Old Continent agree, given the current ban and doubts about the safety of Chinese technology. I am curious how France discouraged the adoption of Huawei’s 5G networks in the past by announcing that the licenses in place would not be renewed when they expired. The €200 million investment plan would date as far back as 2020, but Covid led the Chinese company to postpone operations until the health emergency was over. The plant will reportedly be built in Brumath, near Strasbourg, and will open in 2025.

China is a trading partner

Huawei and the Chinese government are playing the same game. It is the game of the future, studded with smartphones, certainly, but also with self-driving cars and artificial intelligence-based products. The U.S. ban forced Huawei to scale back its business heavily. Its smartphones have all but disappeared from Western markets from 2019 to now. Still, the U.S. company probably did not believe that the hundreds of people working behind the scenes to climb back up the ladder, with Xi Jinping’s and his people’s support, could do what they have since done.

The technology gap is there, needless to deny, between a 3-nanometer processor like the A17 Pro and a 7-nanometer processor like the Kirin 9000s, especially at the high end of the market; the difference is significant. Huawei and its people pay a gap against the world’s best productions that we can quantify as five years. The ban, however, aimed to leave Huawei about eight years behind. Huawei assures that it achieved the results independently, without the Chinese government’s help. After all, the alleged closeness of Xi Jinping and his people in the company was among the main reasons for the U.S. administration’s ban. But the facts speak for themselves beyond the background: the ban was less effective than expected.

New French branches

As Reuters points out, by authorizing the construction of the factory, the French government would like to strengthen relations with China, which is currently the third most important trading partner behind the European Union and the United States. The reopening of Beijing was formally defined last summer when France extended licenses on Huawei’s 5G in some of the country’s cities. After all, the ban itself – the one originally imposed by the U.S. – has already shown its first cracks: a blatant demonstration of this is the fact that Huawei succeeded in bringing a top-of-the-line 5G smartphone – Mate 60 and its variants – back to the market, effectively circumventing all the bans imposed by the then Trump administration. According to Bloomberg, Ren Zhengfei’s company allegedly succeeded in its intent by hiring former employees of the Dutch ASML and simultaneously transferring some patents necessary for the technology’s development (and use).