Seagate Technology agreed to pay a $300 million fine for violating US export control regulations by selling hard discs to China’s Huawei. Read to know more.
Seagate to pay fines to US authorities
In a settlement with the authorities, Seagate Authorities is paying fines worth around $300 for violating American export control regulations. The firm violated them by selling over . waterfordbanquet.com 1 billion worth of hard disc drives to Huawei, a Chinese firm between August 2020 and September 2021. The US firm supplied drives despite the law restricting sales of products created with US technology to Chinese firms. Owing to natural security and foreign relations, Huawei was incorporated on the US trade blacklist in 2019.
The fines are one of the most recent steps taken by Washington for preventing China from acquiring technology with the capacity for bolstering the military, allowing human-rights infractions, or even endangering US security. The new ruling stated Seagate manufactured drives in China, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Northern Ireland and used equipment subjected to the export laws.
More on the matter
According to the US Department of Commerce, Seagate supplied Huawei and shipped 7.4 million drives. Following the enforcement of the new force, two other major providers, Western Digital (WDC) and Toshiba (TOSBF), stopped shipping to Huawei. Even after “its competitors had stopped selling to them. Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei. Today’s action is the consequence,” stated Matthew Axelrod. Axelrod is the assistant secretary for export enforcement at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security.
Moreover, as per Axelrod, the fines are the biggest in the organization’s history. For a while, Seagate maintained that selling the drives created abroad was exempt. This is because they were not a byproduct of US machinery. “While we believed we complied with all relevant export control laws at the time we made the hard disk drive sales at issue. We are also determined that settling this matter was the best course of action,” stated Dave Mosley. Mosley is the CEO of Seagate.