Huawei Phone Buyers Don’t Share Trump’s Concerns

The belfry of Berlin’s landmark Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, an imposing former imperial church that was preserved as a partial ruin after World War II, is now wrapped in a huge ad for Huawei, the Chinese electronics company. Unlike on previous occasions when something like this was tried, Berliners aren’t protesting.

The setup is symbolic of the ascent of Huawei Technologies Co. outside the U.S., a trajectory that has not been changed by an all-out offensive against the company by the Trump administration. Although that onslaught mainly targets Huawei’s network equipment business — the U.S. tells its allies that the company’s equipment represents a spying threat — it could be expected to tarnish a brand that is China’s sixth and the world’s 48th most valuable, according to Kantar’s BrandZ ranking for 2018. That, however, doesn’t appear to be the case. Global consumers are delivering a quiet vote of no-confidence in Donald Trump’s U.S. The country where Apple Inc.’s iPhone was born may soon find itself in the bizarre position of shunning the global industry leader — a type of spiteful self-harm hardly befitting the global tech superpower.