Two-thirds of Huawei R&D staff in the US laid off

Six hundred jobs go at Futurewei as a result of US government's ongoing dispute with Huawei

As expected, Huawei has announced major job cuts across its US research and development operations as the dispute with the Trump administration continues.

Some 600 jobs are going at Futurewei, the company's US R&D business, with Huawei directly blaming "the curtailment of business operations caused by the US".

It follows the placement of Huawei and 68 of its subsidiaries on the US ‘Entity List', a blacklist of companies around the world barring US suppliers or buyers from doing business without prior approval from the Department of Commerce.

Huawei has also been accused of participating in rampant intellectual property theft.

Although the US government rowed back somewhat on its initial hardline and will start issuing licences within weeks, the move indicates that Huawei doesn't expect the spat to be fully resolved any time soon. A staff of 250 will be left in the California-based operation for the time being. The current round of cuts are being made at offices in Silicon Valley, Dallas, Washington State and Chicago.

Reuters reports that Futurewei has been more or less crippled since the start of the ban anyway.

It quotes an unnamed employee who had escaped the current round of redundancies as saying: "On the 17th of May, Huawei asked everyone at Futurewei to upload everything to the Huawei cloud, right before the ban took effect.

"After that, basically, Futurewei stopped doing any work - almost stopped everything."

Huawei had around 1,500 employees in the US across its various operations, of which around 60 per cent were employed at Futurewei, a business with a $510 million turnover.

However, that figure has been dropping sharply during 2019 when, even before the ban, US mobile operators stopped selling or taking new orders for Huawei smartphone handsets, pre-empting the Executive Order.

Lay offs began late last week, with workers seen leaving with their belongings within minutes of being told that their job no longer existed.