US sanctions will they have the skin of Chinese tech? After the new retaliatory measures imposed by the United States Department of Commerce, Huawei, the world leader in telecoms and world number two in smartphones, is finding itself increasingly isolated. His compatriot ByteDance sees his flagship platform, TikTok, torn between contradictory injunctions from Wahington, which wants to force its sale under the pretext of protecting American data, and those of Pekin, which wants to protect Chinese algorithms.
The fate of TikTok could be quickly sealed: according to the American press, the software publisher Oracle would have found an agreement with ByteDance at the expense of Microsoft and Walmart. According to Wall Street Journal, who quotes a source close to the matter, Oracle is about to be named as “Trusted technological partner” from TikTok in the United States, but direct selling is not on the agenda. This deal should not include the algorithm that allows TikTok to quickly identify user tastes, according to the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post.
At the end of August, the Chinese authorities, opposed to the forced Americanization of a Chinese nugget, had counterattacked by protecting the exports of technologies such as the recommendation of contents, facial or voice recognition and other applications of artificial intelligence in which Chinese start-ups are excellent. If the new entity is to copy TikTok’s algorithm, the user experience could lose fluidity for some time.
Huawei remains the most affected by sanctions
The fate of WeChat, Tencent’s flagship application, remains uncertain for the moment. A week after targeting TikTok at the end of July, Donald Trump announced the ban for American companies to do business with WeChat. Enough to drop the price of Tencent on the stock market. The decree leaves a month and a half for the administration to determine the details of the penalties. Faced with protests from American companies based in China, worried about being cut off from WeChat, which the Chinese use to chat but also to pay in stores, or to book trips, the US government has decided that the sanctions will not apply not to WeChat in China.
Huawei remains the most affected by the sanctions: after American software and components, it is now producers around the world who are affected by the ban on selling microchips to the Chinese giant, as long as they themselves use American products… The Koreans Samsung and LG have stopped supplying certain screens to Huawei, insofar as they work with chips targeted by the United States, the Korean press reported on Wednesday (September 9th). In mid-July, the world leader in semiconductor production, Taiwanese TSMC, which burned chips developed by Huawei, had to abandon one of its main customers. The build-up of sanctions had already led Huawei’s interim CEO to say the company’s survival was at stake.
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