Huawei VP calls comment by US official ‘senseless’

BRUSSELS — A senior representative of Chinese tech company Huawei lashed out at Gordon Sondland, United States ambassador to the European Union, in one of the strongest public remarks ever by the company against fearmongering.

In a ballroom in Brussels, Belgium, on Thursday, with more than 100 guests, mostly Europeans, Abraham Liu, Huawei’s vice-president for the European region and chief representative to the EU institutions, launched into a robust defense of the technology giant.

“Recently, Huawei has been under constant attack by some countries and politicians. We are shocked, or sometimes feel amused, by those ungrounded and senseless allegations,” he said.

“For example, yesterday, the US ambassador to the European Union, Mr Sondland, said someone in Beijing could remotely run a certain car off the road on a 5G network and kill the person that’s in it. This is an insult to people’s intelligence, let alone the technological experts around the world,” Liu said.

“Excluding Huawei from the market doesn’t mean the network is safe. For example, since Huawei’s equipment is not used in US networks, does the US have the most secure network? The answer is no.”

Huawei has an excellent cybersecurity record, Liu said, with its devices being approved by strict reviews by multiple regulators and operators. Its partners in Europe include big-name telecom operators, including Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, Vodafone, Orange, Proximus and others. These partners “have publicly endorsed their trust in Huawei”, he said. “I applaud these sensible approaches.”

“Cybersecurity should remain a technical issue, instead of an ideological issue, because technical issues can always be resolved through the right solutions. Ideological issues cannot,” he said.

Certain Western governments and media outlets have consistently cast doubt on Huawei’s ownership and governance. Liu reiterated that “Huawei is a 100 percent employeeowned private enterprise”, adding that “if we want commercial success, we must follow our own business ethics. We have never harmed the interests of any customer or nation”.

“For Huawei, Europe has become our second home,” he said. “Our success is Europe’s success. Our loss would be Europe’s loss.”