To settle suspected breaches of export restrictions relating to the sale of hard disk drives to Huawei Technologies, US authorities on Wednesday fined Seagate Technology $300 million, according to the Commerce Department.
Notwithstanding US restrictions, the firm participated in the delivery of hard disk drives to Huawei businesses valued at approximately $1.1 billion.
The Commerce Department claims that the offenses occurred between August 2020 and September 2021.
The US included Huawei and a few of its affiliates on a trade blacklist in 2019 that imposed license requirements on goods transfers, exports, and re-exports.
In order to “better confront the ongoing danger,” the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) implemented limitations on a number of foreign-made products in 2020 “by Huawei to the interests of US foreign and national security policy.
Seagate continued supplying Huawei with hard disk drives even after Huawei was added to the Entity List for actions detrimental to our national security and its rivals stopped doing business with them as a result of our foreign direct product rule “said Matthew Axelrod, assistant secretary for export enforcement.
The greatest single administrative resolution in our agency’s history, today’s action is the result “He continued, mentioning the BIS.
The Commerce Department highlighted that Seagate said it will continue doing business with Huawei despite the constraints BIS set in 2020.
Seagate performed this despite the fact that its only two rivals had quit providing hard disk drives to Huawei, turning Seagate into Huawei’s only source of supply “the division said.
The investigation by the agency found that Seagate was responsible for the unauthorized shipping of more than 7.4 million hard disk drives.