US fines tech firm Seagate $300 million over Huawei shipments

US authorities on Wednesday fined Seagate Technology $300 million to resolve alleged violations of export controls related to selling hard disk drives to Huawei Technologies, the Commerce Department said.

The manufacturer was involved in shipments of more than $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to Huawei entities despite US controls.

According to the Commerce Department, the violations occurred between August 2020 and September 2021.

In 2019, the US added Huawei and some of its affiliates to a trade blacklist that imposed licensing requirements on exports, re-exports and transfers of goods.

The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) also introduced controls on certain foreign-made items in 2020 to “better address the perceived threat” posed by Huawei to US national security and foreign policy interests.

The Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement said, “Even after Huawei was placed on the Entity List for conduct prejudicial to our national security, and its competitors stopped selling them because of our Foreign Direct Product Rule, Seagate continued to sell Huawei Continued to send hard disk drives to Matthew Axelrod in a statement.

“Today’s action is the result: the largest stand-alone administrative resolution in our agency’s history,” he added, referring to BIS.

The Commerce Department said Seagate said it would continue to do business with Huawei despite the BIS imposing controls in 2020.

“Seagate did this despite the fact that only two of its competitors had stopped selling HDDs (hard disk drives) to Huawei, resulting in Seagate becoming Huawei’s sole source provider,” the department said.

According to the bureau’s investigation, Seagate was involved in the shipment of more than 7.4 million hard disk drives without authorization.

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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)