That amounts to about 100 people -- 70 of them U.S. residents and 30 expatriates, a spokeswoman confirmed Thursday afternoon.
Huawei's three other U.S. divisions -- consumer, enterprise and R&D -- aren't affected.
The cuts aren't surprising, considering a recent Congressional report recommended that U.S. service providers steer clear of the vendor.
At the same time, Huawei isn't giving up on U.S. business. The company delivered the following statement to the press Thursday afternoon:
Huawei Technologies USA recently simplified and streamlined its organization to sustain a profitable infrastructure business in the U.S. We have limited the reduction necessary to best streamline the organization to allow the company to continue providing U.S. carrier customers with the best technology solutions while maintaining our cost structure. Our long-term commitment to the U.S. infrastructure market and our U.S. carrier customers remains unchanged.
Yeah, remember that CLWR is/was Huawei's flagship next-gen 4G contract (LTE TDD) in the U.S. If they lose that they don't have much infrastructure going on in the U.S. Might as well move to Canada.
True Phil, but which situation nets more US jobs overall? For example where are Huawei's hardware designers located? How many US employees does Cisco have vs Huawei?
We're getting told by one source that Huawei repatriated a lot of US-based employees as well, just before the Congressional report.
I'm not trying to say the report has zero influence on this round of cuts. It's got to be a factor at some level. Huawei ramped up steeply and really poured on the PR a couple of years ago; their expectations have to have scaled back somewhat, you'd think.
>>Huawei would actually have legitimate reason to just plain streamline.
Good point, Craig. Huawei already "repatriated" a chunk of people from the BT team in England, and that had nothing to do with the political climate in the US.
Getting laid off right before the holidays really sucks, and my thoughts and sympathies go out to all the families affected.
Huawei probably cut deeper than they really neded to to send a message, but at the end of the day this is a human tragedy.
While the other vendors in the telecom equipment space might be tempted to celebrate that Huawei is backing off the US market, they should recall that the first people cut will all be US citizens, hired at a time when no one else was recruiting telecom talent.
What does Huawei know about the CLWR deal I wonder and did that motivate this action? Analysts were already speculating that Sprint might block Huawei from its Clearwire deal if/when it closes the $2B takeover deal
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