Huawei has announced a series of layoffs in the UK as the company is forced to alter its corporate strategy in the face of further bans and restrictions.
The Chinese giant is set to pull sales all of its Enterprise hardware lines, including all servers, storage and networking switches from the UK.
The news means severe job cuts across Huawei’s Enterprise hardware divisions in the UK as the company faces yet more challenges, despite pledges to remain in the country.
Huawei Enterprise
“Our Enterprise Business is to focus its operations in the UK to deliver fewer products in a better way. Unfortunately this means a number of roles are no longer required, however, we hope to reposition colleagues who are affected elsewhere within the businesses,” a Huawei spokesperson told The Register, which broke the story, in a statement.
“Ultimately, the business has done a review and decided to focus on a number of product lines,” the spokesperson added, noting that Huawei will, “continue to provide full service and maintenance to existing customers for the life-cycle of our products.”
The Register said it had initially been told of Huawei’s move by several channel partners, and that 20 of the 50 roles in the Enterprise team would be affected. The European arm of the Enterprise division is not thought to be affected by the news.
The move is the latest big change from Huawei as it looks to evolve its business following a number of restrictions and bans from Western nations.
The UK government has pledged to remove Huawei kit from its mobile networks by 2027 following pressure from the US, which maintains the company is an arm of the Chinese government. Huawei denies these claims, which the US has never provided any concrete evidence to back up.
Huawei has been on the US ‘non-entity’ list since last year, a status that prevents US companies from doing business with it without a licence. This effective blacklisting has limited Huawei’s access to key US technologies such as the Android operating system, with Samsung recently revealing it would end sales of smartphone components to Huawei
Via The Register