Instead, the phone was sent back to London.
What you need to know
- A PCMag writer in the UK tried shipping a Huawei P30 to a colleague in the U.S.
- FedEx stopped the shipment due to “U.S. government issue with Huawei and China.”
- One Huawei rep says this is a “complete misinterpretation.”
The effects of the United States’ ban on Huawei has reached far and wide, resulting in a lot of hoops for the Chinese company to jump through. Most recently, the folks at PCMag discovered another effect of the ban when trying to ship a Huawei phone from the UK to the U.S. Here’s what happened.
One of PCMag’s writers in the UK shipped a Huawei P30 Pro to one of the site’s U.S. employees. The phone was shipped using Parcelforce and FedEx, and to ship it internationally, the P30’s model number had to be listed on a shipping form.
This is totally ridiculous. Our UK writer tried to send us his @HuaweiMobile P30 unit so I could check something – not a new phone, our existing phone, already held by our company, just being sent between offices – and THIS happened @FedEx pic.twitter.com/sOaebiqfN6
— Sascha Segan (@saschasegan) June 21, 2019
After departing London, the P30 Pro arrived in Indianapolis, and after being delayed there for a few hours, got returned back to London. PCMag reached out to Parcelforce’s customer service team on Twitter, to which one rep responded with, “As advised on the information provided, due to the issues the USA government is having with Huawei they don’t accept any items with this brand.”
Following that, a FedEx customer service agent said this:
On May 16, 2019, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and 68 of its global affiliates were included on the ‘Entity List’ which sets out a list of certain entities that US companies are restricted from doing business with. My apologies for the inconvenience this has caused you.
A representative from Huawei replied to the conversation on Twitter, saying that FedEx has a “misinterpretation” of the executive order and entity list.
PCMag reached out to UPS to see if it was following a similar set of rules, but it looks like FedEx is on its own with this vendetta. According to UPS:
There is not a general ban on shipping Huawei devices between United Kingdom and United States locations.
Neither FedEx or Parcelforce has issued an official comment/response to this incident, but should that happen, we’ll update this article accordingly.
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