Which expert knows the reason why Huawei acquired Sanye Company in the United States, and why the acquisition failed.

The Huawei merger and acquisition of Sanye shows the numerous obstacles that Chinese companies face in the high-tech field of the United States and the U.S. blockade of China in the high-tech field. For China, on the one hand, it needs to promote strategic mutual trust between China and the United States, and on the other hand, it must improve its own scientific and technological level.

On February 18, China’s Huawei announced that it would give up its acquisition of specific assets, including intellectual property rights, from the American company Sanye. The deal, worth a mere US$2 million, ended in failure. The most direct reason for Huawei's failure in this acquisition is that it failed to pass the security review of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. However, the deeper reason is the United States' consistent blockade policy against China in the field of high-tech products.

As we all know, the United States has long established a strict security review mechanism when it comes to foreign mergers and acquisitions of American companies. In recent years, many Chinese companies have "hit a brick wall" in front of this security review mechanism. Huawei's acquisition of Sanye is just the latest example.

In this transaction, the most concerning thing is a technology patent of Sanye Company: it allows a group of computers to be bundled to form a more powerful computer. This technology may be called high-tech, but the total cost of the patents and some assets of the bankrupt Sanye was only US$2 million, which attracted the attention of the US Department of Defense, which in turn caused the acquisition to abort under security review. middle.

In order to block Huawei's acquisition of Sanye, five U.S. congressmen wrote to Treasury Secretary Geithner and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, both members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, saying that Huawei's acquisition seemed certain to lead to The transfer of advanced U.S. computer technology to China poses risks to U.S. national security. In fact, the setback in Huawei's acquisition is not an isolated case. As the Ministry of Commerce's statement said, in recent years, relevant parties in the United States have obstructed and interfered with Chinese companies' trade and investment activities in the United States for various reasons, including protecting national security.

The Huawei merger and acquisition of Sanye shows the numerous obstacles that Chinese companies face in the high-tech field of the United States and the U.S. blockade of China in the high-tech field. Although the blockade is disguised as legal in many cases, its essence is, on the one hand, the various doubts and even hostility the United States has towards Chinese companies and China, and on the other hand, it is to maintain and consolidate the United States' high opinion of China. Technological advantages. In 2009, U.S. officials announced that they would relax export controls on high-tech products to China; in 2010, the U.S. also said it would lift controls on the export of C130 large transport aircraft to China. However, the results all show that this is just talk. This shows that we should not imagine that the United States will relax its high-tech exports to China for a long time to come.

More than 20 years ago, Konfala, Director of the Strategic Trade Control Division of the U.S. Department of Defense, once said: “The United States wants to maintain its leading position in key areas of strategic significance for 30 years, and generally decides to export to China accordingly. " Today, this sentence is still the principle of the United States on the issue of high-tech exports to China.

On the day Huawei announced that it had given up its acquisition of Sanye, the New York Times commented that the merger was not as simple as it seemed. It was a broader dispute between Washington and Beijing. Part of the impasse will have chilling implications for future bilateral deals. To put it mildly, the so-called deadlock, to put it bluntly, means that there has been a lack of strategic trust between China and the United States. As long as this fundamental problem is not resolved, the United States will lack fundamental motivation to relax or even cancel its high-tech export controls to China. For China, in order to push the United States to relax its high-tech export controls to China, it needs to promote strategic mutual trust between China and the United States on the one hand, and to improve its own technological level on the other. As China's technological strength and level continue to improve, the United States' high-tech blockade against China will become increasingly meaningless. At the same time, the U.S.’s approach to the Huawei acquisition once again reminds us that we also need to conduct security reviews for foreign mergers and acquisitions of Chinese companies. Recently, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Notice on Establishing a Security Review System for Mergers and Acquisitions of Domestic Enterprises by Foreign Investors". In a sense, this is a good start.