Huawei Switzerland rejects Mike Pompeo’s privacy risk accusations

Swiss telecom firm Sunrise is developing its 5G network with technology pioneered by Huawei. Keystone / Aleksandar Plavevski

Huawei’s Swiss vice-president Felix Kamer has rejected US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s accusations that its technology passes on information to the Chinese Communist Party, calling them “absurd”. 

During his recent visit to Switzerland, Pompeo told the NZZ newspaper that the use of Chinese technology risks information being passed on to the Chinese government.  

“No one has access to the data that passes through our telecom equipment: neither us, nor any third party,” said Kamer in an interview in the Le Temps newspaper on Thursday. 

He described Pompeo’s accusation as “absurd” and said that the trade war between the US and China was harming Huawei’s business. Kamer said Huawei Switzerland was in constant contact with its customers to help reassure them about privacy concerns.  

“We will resist an American embargo on software and hardware,” he said. 

In Switzerland, Huawei intends to strengthen its research collaborations with the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and other universities.  

“There will not be a single Huawei research centre in Switzerland, but projects all over the country, with the intention of significantly increasing our presence in the coming years,” Kamer said. He had recently mentioned the creation of 1,000 research posts in the small Alpine country.