Report: Huawei CEO says company has exited U.S. network gear market

Report: Huawei CEO says company has exited U.S. network gear market: Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei said the company had decided to exit the U.S. network equipment market, according to media reports, because of continuing disputes between the U.S. and China and lingering concerns, which the company has called unfounded, that Huawei itself poses a security threat to the United States.

In a rare media interview with French journalists on Nov. 25, Ren said that Huawei is “a private enterprise without any high-level political position,” and that there are much bigger issues at play in U.S.-Chinese relations than the status of the company itself.

“If Huawei is an obstacle to bilateral trade, then it’s really not worth it,” Ren said, according to a translated version of the Chinese interview transcript by NetEase and posted by ZDNet. “That’s why we had decided to exit the U.S. market, so as not to be caught in the middle. Since then we’ve still been doing very well.” Foreign Policy also had an extremely similar translation.

“Anyway, our phones are selling very well in the U.S., they can’t say our phones also have security problems right? That’s because the software is American, and not ours,” he said, in apparent reference to Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android, which powers most of Huawei’s smartphones. “We do not have an operating system. We do things reasonably.”