Huawei, SMIC Suppliers Acquired Billions Worth Of Licenses For U.S. Goods

WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Suppliers to Chinese language telecoms giant Huawei and China's top chipmaker SMIC acquired billions of dollars price of licenses from November by April to sell them goods and expertise regardless of their being on a U.S. trade blacklist, documents released by Congress confirmed on Thursday.

In line with the documents, first obtained by Reuters, 113 export licenses value $sixty one billion were authorized for suppliers to ship merchandise to Huawei (HWT.UL) while one other 188 licenses valued at nearly $42 billion had been greenlighted for Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) (0981.HK).

The information also showed that more than 9 out of 10 license purposes were granted to SMIC suppliers while 69% of requests to ship to Huawei were accepted over the same period.

The U.S. Home of Representatives Overseas Affairs committee on Thursday voted to grant a request by its top Republican member Michael McCaul to release the licensing knowledge, which it acquired from the Commerce Division in May.

The numbers enraged China hawks in Washington, who've made a concerted effort to deprive Chinese language firms of entry to superior U.S. technology.

Republican senator Marco Rubio told Reuters he thinks President Joe Biden wants to clarify why the companies have continued to receive "waivers."

"It's just another example of President Biden not taking the financial and security threat posed by the Chinese Communist Celebration severely," he said.

McCaul mentioned in a statement that "It's clearly in our nationwide curiosity to increase transparency and public scrutiny on how our nation transfers its expertise to an adversary,"

"ARBITRARY SNAPSHOT"

However, the Commerce Department mentioned that the release of an "arbitrary snapshot" of license approvals "dangers politicizing the licensing course of and misrepresenting the nationwide security determinations" made by the government.

It also pressured that authorised license functions don't symbolize precise shipments and around half of all licenses are used. It added that license purposes involving Huawei and SMIC are processed beneath insurance policies developed by the Trump administration and maintained by the Biden administration.

A former senior Commerce Department official in the Trump administration who declined to be named echoed the company's view.

"This very small interval of license activity is just not an correct window into the Huawei and SMIC license course of," he said, noting that the goal of preventing the companies from acquiring leading edge expertise with out unnecessarily harming U.S. exports of different items had been successful. "This [doc release] seems designed to mislead folks and generate headlines," he added.

Huawei declined to comment, while SMIC didn't reply to a request for remark.

Huawei was positioned on a commerce blacklist in Might 2019 over national security issues, forcing its U.S. suppliers and others to acquire a particular license to ship items to it. SMIC was added to the so-called entity checklist in December 2020, over fears it might divert superior know-how to military users.

A majority of the licenses granted did not authorize shipments of sensitive gadgets. Of the 113 licenses authorized for Huawei throughout the interval, 80 had been for non-sensitive items that solely required a license as a result of the recipient was blacklisted. For SMIC, the figure was 121 of 188.