U.S. Takes On China With Huawei Sanctions

The race to build a smart city is on and one country appears to be leading the pack. A few weeks ago, I attended the Smart City Expo in Barcelona, where it was hard to ignore the growing influence China's having on the industry. Take a walk around here and you see many companies that are from China and that seems to only be growing. Would you agree with that? I would agree that mainland China has a very, very strong mindset. when it comes to embracing innovation, entrepreneurship, empowerment. According to Deloitte, half of the smart cities being built worldwide are in China, where $400 billion will be spent on 5G infrastructure over the next five years. In Guangzhou today, they have a level four autonomous vehicle now running on the street. As a taxi, you can call for services. Compare that to the United States, where the federal government has invested just $100 million. 60 million into smart city projects. China's had a 100-city, you know, smart city national plan. They're able to really grow and develop smart cities because they have a top-down way of being able to promote a national agenda. I mean, the U.S. has literally the opposite with hundreds of thousands of local and state and county-level governments. At the center of China's technology ambitions is Huawei, considered the crown jewel tech industry, but not everyone sees it that way. In May, the United States placed the company on a trade blacklist, and in November, lawmakers banned Huawei from participating in a federal subsidy program. They say Huawei is a national security threat. Do you think that any of the controversy misconceptions that are in the U .S. have impacted your initiatives to grow in the smart city space? Yes, in a very good way, actually. Leadership in 5G, I think we got the most commercial contracts. of which the majority of those contracts are actually outside of China and in mainland and continental Europe, I should say. Is there an effect? Yes, a very positive one, I'd say. One of Huawei's latest contracts is with Barcelona. It's an interesting deal. Barcelona wants to use smart city technologies to empower its citizens. Yet some reports claim Huawei's technology has done the opposite, contributing to the surveillance of China's minority population. Huawei denies those claims, and Barcelona says... as the deal is similar to the 200 others it signed with private technology companies. So we are happy to have this agreement with Huawei, but as I said, we are happy to have it with any other private company that wants to settle in Barcelona. As for China, new reports show an increased collaboration between China and Russia when it comes to AI and smart city technologies. And that could meet a whole new set of challenges in the fight to win the smart city race. Thank you.