In the course of the ongoing trade dispute between the USA and China and the resulting US telecommunications emergency, the Chinese company loses more and more partners. After recently Google and the chip developer ARM had forced the cooperation to end, the SD Association has now excluded Huawei. This is an industry association that sets new SD card standards. Due to the exclusion, Huawei may no longer build new devices with SD card slots. This is hardly relevant for the company’s smartphones where Huawei uses its own memory cards, but it does affect other business areas.
In addition, Huawei “voluntarily” left the semiconductor standardization group JEDEC Solid State Technology Association . However, since JEDEC standards are open source, the company can continue to use them, but can no longer influence the development of new standards.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has also “temporarily” restricted Huawei’s membership, but the Chinese company has not yet been completely excluded. So far, Huawei has financially supported the organization that owns the Wi-Fi brand and awards the Wi-Fi Certified logo. In the future, Huawei will continue to offer WLAN in its devices, but Wi-Fi certification will no longer be available for the time being.
In addition, the US company Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced that it will no longer supply Huawei with technology due to the decree of US President Trump. This means that new devices of the group will no longer have Bluetooth. Should this decision be final, Huawei would have to forego the wireless transmission of data, music and videos for the time being until the development of its own standard.
In addition to the discontinuation of cooperation agreements, Huawei is also experiencing increasing difficulties in selling existing devices, as mobile phone companies outside the USA are also withdrawing their smartphones from the range. The reason given for this is that consumers fear that they will no longer receive updates for the devices in the near future once the 90-day suspension of Huawei’s trade ban has ended.
