Huawei hopes for open US policy

HUAWEI Technologies’ founder Ren Zhengfei said yesterday it would be “extremely difficult” for the United States to end the sanctions that have crippled its phone business, but that he hoped the new US administration would have an “open policy.”

Ren, who was making his first media appearance since March last year, said he hoped US President Joe Biden’s administration would bear in mind US business interests when forming its policy. He said it was “conducive” to the financial performance of US companies to supply Chinese firms.

Huawei achieved positive growth for both 2020 revenue and net profit, Ren said, adding that the company continued to see significant levels of confidence from its customers.

“We hope the new administration will harbor an open policy for the benefit of the American firms and also the economic development of the US,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a 5G mining project Huawei was launching in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan. He added he would welcome a call from Biden.

The administration of former US President Donald Trump added Huawei, China’s leading telecommunications equipment maker, to a US trade blacklist in May 2019 citing national security concerns. Huawei has repeatedly denied it poses a risk.

That effectively banned US-based firms from selling Huawei essential US technology and last August, the ban was extended to foreign firms with US business, reaching chief suppliers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd, which effectively cut off Huawei’s access to chip supplies.

Ren said he believe it would still be “extremely difficult” for Huawei to be taken off the US entity list, but stressed that they continued to hope to buy “large volumes” of US equipment and materials if the Biden administration would allow it.

Ren said he was confident of Huawei’s ability to survive even as its mobile business remains under pressure.

Ren said the company would not sell its smart devices businesses and that there would be no major leadership changes.

He said that the company’s push into mining technology, smart airports and other areas would offset the revenue lost from its smartphone business in a year’s time. Huawei’s consumer business made up 54.4 percent of the company’s revenues in 2019.

The United States should “consider the future” of its chip industry, currently barred from selling to Huawei, Ren said, noting that Intel’s market share had fallen recently.

“If the number drops further, whether the US can continue to keep its chip industry, there’s a big question mark,” he said.

He said “not a single” US company had approached Huawei over his offer in September 2019 to license 5G tech to companies, but that the offer remained open.

CANSINO Biologics Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine showed 65.7 percent efficacy in preventing symptomatic cases and a 90.98 percent success rate in stopping severe disease in an interim analysis of global trials, Pakistan’s health minister said yesterday.

The positive data moves the vaccine, jointly developed by a team led by Chen Wei, a researcher from the Beijingbased Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a step closer to becoming China’s third successful shot for the disease.

The CanSinoBIO vaccine is being tested in Pakistan, Mexico, Russia, Argentina and Chile, according to clinical trial registration data, and the company has supply deals with some of those countries, including Mexico.

Pakistan’s health minister, Faisal Sultan, had said that the country could receive “in the range of tens of millions” of the vaccine under an agreement with the Chinese firm.

Hassan Abbas, head of the CanSinoBIO’s trial at AJ Pharma in Pakistan, said it has already applied to the government for permission to import the vaccine.

“The initial set of vaccines will come in vials already filled, but we hope in the future to get them in the form of concentrates from CanSino, and do the filling here in Pakistan,” he said.

The efficacy of the shot is based on analysis of 30,000 participants and 101 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the minister said on Twitter, quoting data from an independent data monitoring committee.

It was not immediately clear whether the study also looked into the vaccine’s efficacy against new and highly transmissible variants first found in South Africa, Britain and Brazil.

No serious safety concerns have been raised in the study, Sultan said.

In the Pakistani subset, efficacy of the CanSinoBIO vaccine at preventing symptomatic cases was 74.8 percent and 100 percent at preventing severe disease, Sultan added.

CanSinoBIO was not immediately available for comment.

The vaccine, Ad5-nCoV, is also one of the only two onedose vaccines in the world to release its phase-3 data. The other one-dose vaccine was developed by Johnson & Johnson. The single-shot vaccine can be more effective to execute mass vaccination.

CanSinoBIO’s vaccine, which was approved for use in the Chinese military last year and has since been given to at least 40,000-50,000 people, uses a modified common cold virus known as adenovirus type-5 (Ad5) to carry genetic material from the coronavirus protein into the body.

However, researchers in an early and mid-stage trial report expressed concern the vaccine may not work in those previously exposed to Ad5, as the pre-existing antibody against the common cold virus could weaken the vaccine-triggered immune response.

CanSinoBIO is also testing a two-dose regimen of the vaccine in China including on participants aged between 6 and 17 and older than 55.

Shots from Chinese companies Sinovac and Sinopharm have shown efficacy of between 50 percent and 91 percent.