Mozilla has announced progress about their upcoming smartphone. Manufacturing companies like LG, Huawei, TCL, and ZTE will be working on the Mozilla smartphone. Mozilla showed models of the phones from TCL and ZTE at a telecommunications industry meeting in Barcelona, Spain.
Last month we wrote about how a congressional panel is warning that Huawei and ZTE are threats to U.S. national security and should be blocked from making any mergers or acquisitions in America. The state-backed Chinese media companies China Economy & Informatization and People’s Daily said that U.S. based Cisco is a backdoor for espionage. Supposedly China Unicom is phasing out Cisco gear and they believe that 72 members of Congress is possibly being influenced by their Cisco shares and the controversial Patriot Act. [Engadget]
A congressional panel is warning that Huawei and ZTE are a threat to U.S. national security and should be blocked from making any mergers or acquisitions in America. The panel conducted an 11 month investigation in the two companies.
The European Union is preparing to launch a massive trade case against Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corporation. The EU has gathered evidenced for an anti-dumping case against both companies and said that the two companies have obtained illegal government subsidies. The two companies also sold products in the EU at below cost. Huawei and ZTE could be subject to punitive EU tariffs. Huawei and ZTE compete with European telecommunication companies like Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Siemens-Nokia. China is Europe’s second biggest trading partner after the U.S. EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht has complained in the past that China subsidies “nearly everything,” which makes it hard to compete.
Google announced that they would be acquiring Motorola Mobility about 8 months ago for $12.5 billion. Between now and then, the government went from questioning the deal to approving of it. Google gained 17,000 patents through the acquisition to help them protect Android, but Motorola has massive overhead.
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Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE are reported to be left out of a potential multi-billion Sprint contract due to national security concerns. According to a source with The Wall Street Journal, the Defense Department and U.S. lawmakers are concerned with the two companies’ ties to the Chinese government and the military. If Sprint works with these two companies, then it could lead to security implications of letting their equipment into the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.
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Earlier this week we reported about how Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) is looking for acquisition bidders. Palm has been burning money every month and their devices have not been selling as much as hoped. Now the latest rumor is that Palm approached Chinese company Huawei Technologies for preliminary acquisition talks. Palm approached Huawei’s investment bank regarding the deal according to a source with Reuters. [Reuters]
