Huawei Takes Out Full-Page Ad to Coincide With Merkel’s Party Congress
(Bloomberg) -- Huawei Technologies Co. marked the start of Angela Merkel’s party congress by taking out a full-page newspaper advert explaining why it shouldn’t be excluded from the country’s 5G wireless network.
Huawei has faced the most thorough security tests of any company, it said in an ad in Friday’s edition of the Handelsblatt business newspaper -- just as Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union started a two-day convention that will discuss a motion to prevent the Chinese company from supplying the new network.
“In the 30 years since our company was founded, there hasn’t been a single security-related incident that has undermined the confidence of our customers,” Huawei said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure from U.S. and Germany’s intelligence services -- as well as her own party -- to keep Huawei out of her country’s 5G network over security concerns. She is, however, sticking to her guns, determined to let Huawei participate as long as the company fulfills certain security standards.
“We should remain open when it comes to technology, but we should set the standards,” Merkel told delegates at the party conference in Leipzig, Germany.
In its ad, Huawei also says it’s a transparent company owned by its employees, with an independent German operation based in Dusseldorf that isn’t bound by Chinese rules and instead complies with local laws.
Excluding Huawei would hurt phone companies by removing a key supplier, possibly leading to “a security nightmare,” Huawei said.
(Adds Merkel comment in fifth paragraph)
--With assistance from Patrick Donahue and Arne Delfs.
To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Blackman in Berlin at ablackman@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Stefan Nicola
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