Last November, with U.S. sanctions starting to bite, the Chinese telecom giant sold off its Honor smartphone brand — to the state. Why?
A Huawei Honor 5X, on display at the Mobile World Congress 2016. Credit: Kārlis Dambrāns, Creative Commons
Last November, Huawei announced that it had sold its budget smartphone brand called Honor to a consortium of state-backed investors. The deal, which Reuters said brought Huawei $15 billion, came just after the U.S. government tightened sanctions against the Chinese telecom giant. Faced with the threat of losing access to American chips, Huawei sold Honor (not its main smartphone brand) to the Chinese government. This week, as part of an occasional feature, The Wire breaks down the Huawei transaction and the broader implications of the deal, with Scott Livingston, a former analyst at the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Washington think tank. Livingston spoke with me after the release of his CSIS report, “Huawei, Honor and China's Evolving State Capitalist Toolkit.”
About two months ago, Huawei said it was going to divest of a popular smartphone brand called Honor. Why did it do that?
The decision to s
Exclusive longform investigative journalism, Q&As, news and analysis, and data on Chinese business elites and corporations. We publish China scoops you won't find anywhere else.
A weekly curated reading list on China from David Barboza, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times.
A daily roundup of China finance, business and economics headlines.
We offer discounts for groups, institutions and students. Go to our Subscriptions page for details.
Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative under Donald Trump, reflects on his decision to launch the trade war with China and begin the process of "strategic decoupling" — a process he says the U.S. must see through to the end.
