Huawei receives reply from Czech cyber watchdog

An assistant waits on a customer at a Huawei Technologies Co Ltd store in Beijing. [File photo/China Daily]

China's tech company Huawei has received a reply from the Czech Republic's cyber watchdog, a spokeswoman for Huawei said on Thursday.

"We have received the reply from National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NUKIB). We are carefully analyzing it and preparing the next steps," Magda Teresa Partyka, Huawei's public relations manager in the country, told Xinhua on Thursday evening, without elaborating on its content.

Huawei is an employee-owned private company, which has evolved into the world's leading telecoms equipment vendor and a market leader in Europe, helping mobile carriers build the information and communication infrastructure.

In December 2018, the NUKIB sent a warning over Huawei's products, saying that Huawei represented a potential national security threat to the country's critical infrastructure. Huawei has categorically rejected the allegations.

On Feb. 8, media outlets including The New York Times reported that Huawei had sent a letter to the head of NUKIB asking for the warning to be rescinded.

The New York Times report, which included no comment from Huawei, described the letter as a "threat", but Partyka described it as a way of communication.

"Huawei has sent a letter to NUKIB as we were trying to contact (them) to arrange a meeting to discuss the issue of the warning. Instead of a meeting, they prefer written communication, therefore we are communicating via letters," Partyka wrote in an email on Thursday morning after being contacted by Xinhua, without elaborating on the content of Huawei's letter to NUKIB.

"As we have expressed already, our goal is to have fair conditions to do business in the Czech Republic. We don't want our company to be discriminated against with no evidence. We are a reliable partner and we do not wish to escalate the situation further. We want to conduct our business here, deliver our products and services to our customers," Partyka wrote, before receiving the reply.

Huawei, which also has a consumer business, producing smartphones and tablets, maintains that it does not pose a security threat, despite accusations by some Western countries and politicians without any supporting evidence.