Casting doubts on Chinese tech giant, Huawei’s license extension for an additional 90 days which would have delayed any impact from the blacklist restrictions on its extensive US supply chain, President Donald Trump on Sunday said, “we are not open to doing business with (Huawei), I don’t want to do business at all because it is a national security threat.”

“Huawei is a company we may not do business with at all,” Trump said.

Advertisement

In his remarks, Trump insisted that the Chinese company was a threat to national security and said he would take a decision on the matter the following day.

He appeared to contradict his chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, who earlier in the day told NBC News that the Department of Commerce was considering extending the reprieve given to Huawei for another 90 days to allow it to continue conducting business with US companies.

“We’re giving a break to our own companies for three months,” Kudlow said.

In May, Washington had banned Huawei from selling its telecommunications equipment to American companies, alleging that the Chinese giant could use those systems for espionage. During the recent G20 summit in June, Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, agreed to a new truce in the ongoing trade war between their countries.

Following the truce, Washington delayed the imposition of new tariffs on China and agreed to temporarily allow Huawei to sell small components, such as computer chips, to US companies. The reprieve on the ban for some of those products is set to expire on Monday.

On July 22, executives of seven tech giants asked Trump to take a decision on Huawei’s trading activity in the US, the White House said in a statement at the time. That day, the US President met with executives from Google, Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, Micron, Broadcom and Western Digital at the White House to discuss the ban on Huawei.

During the meeting, the tech companies’ executives requested that the Department of Commerce take “timely licensing decisions” regarding the restrictions on Huawei.

To cope with trading restrictions with American tech companies like Google, which supplies its Android softwares to Huawei’s products, the Chinese tech company developed its own operating system called HarmonyOS.

Speaking to Sky news CEO of Huawei Ren Zhengfei said, “If the US government does not allow Google to provide Android system, then the world may have a third operating system – and that is not in the best benefit or interests of the United States, allowing a little brother operating system into the world. You cannot rule out the chance that the third operating system might outrun them someday.”