Dramatic cutbacks at Futurewei Technologies leads to 600 lost jobs

As rumored last week, Huawei has announced that 600 of the 850 employees working at its Futurewei Technologies research division in the US will be let go. While Futurewei is technically set up as a separate business from Huawei proper, due to Huawei’s placement on the U.S. Entity List Futurewei is no longer able to share any of its research with its parent company. 

Following the disbanding of the 600 Futurewei employees, Huawei will still have roughly 1,200 employees split between supply chain operations, public relations and customer service support. For what it’s worth, Huawei’s employee headcount has been on a steady decline since U.S. service providers backed out of their collaboration with Huawei to launch the Mate 30 Pro last year due to pressure from the US government. 

There’s a slight chance that things could turn around for Huawei if the trade embargo is lifted by the Trump administration, but it would be years before the company would fully recover.

Source: Reuters