Huawei distances itself after top executive goes off script about US

Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Image

Huawei consumer business CEO Richard Yu speaks about the Mate 10 Pro phone during a keynote address during CES 2018 in Las Vegas on January 9, 2018.

Huawei has looked to distance itself from comments made by one of its top executives, after a CNBC question prompted him to accuse the company’s rivals of playing politics to keep it out of the U.S. market.

The Chinese electronics maker was supposed to enter the market via mobile network AT&T, but the deal fell through. Then intelligence officials urged Americans not to buy phones from Huawei because they could be used to spy on people.

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, CNBC asked Richard Yu, the head of Huawei’s consumer business, at a media roundtable about his thoughts on the company’s issues in the U.S.

While Yu was there to speak about the company’s latest laptop device, the MateBook X Pro, the executive went off-script for several minutes, calling developments in the U.S. “ridiculous” and “unfair.” He blamed his rivals for playing politics to keep Huawei out of America because they are worried that it’s becoming too strong.

“Our competitors are using some political way … To try to kick us out from the U.S. market but we have no issue at all. We are transparent … We are a leading high-tech, innovative company,” Yu said on Sunday. “But they cannot compete with us on product, on technology, on innovation, so they compete with us (using) politics.”

But the public communications team at Huawei did not sanction the comments and have sought to distance the company from Yu’s strong words.

“It’s not right to blame the other party for not accepting us, we can only try harder, maintain our openness and transparency and wait until the other party is willing to communicate with us,” Chen Lifang, Huawei’s head of communications, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post on Tuesday.