In light of Google’s move to cut ties with Huawei, which puts Android updates in jeopardy as well as access to the Google Play Store for future Huawei phones, customers in Asia naturally worried those devices are about to become worthless are reportedly racing to trade them in.
Only to be increasingly turned away from shops in places like Singapore and the Philippines, where not only are the stores saying no way to Huawei — but they’re trying to dump the existing stock they already have.
“If we buy something that is useless, how are we going to sell it?,” Dylan On, a salesman at Singapore retail and repair shop Wanying Pte Ltd., told a Reuters reporter.
His fear that the handsets might be eventually “useless” stems of course from Google’s move over the weekend, which itself was a result of the Trump administration adding Huawei to a trade blacklist that immediately restricts its ability to do business with US companies. Google’s action immediately ratcheted up tensions between the US and China, with the US for a while now having sounded an alarm to pretty much anyone who’ll listen that Huawei may be a proxy for China’s central government as well as its national security apparatus.
RIP Huawei outside of China https://t.co/bUzF2bUnQv
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) May 19, 2019
The company line out of Huawei is that it’s nevertheless pressing full steam ahead, despite all of this — even launching a new phone in Britain on Tuesday. The company is also promising that it’s been prepping a mobile OS to replace Android as a Plan B for its devices, which could be ready as soon as later this year.
Nevertheless, a salesman at Singapore’s Mobile Square phone store told Reuters that there’s been a definite uptick in the number of customers trying to dump their Huawei handsets in recent days. It’s grown from about five people a day to 20 in the last two days. A phone salesperson in Manilla also told the news agency her store would only accept Huawei trade-ins at a 50% discount. Because selling them again, she explained, “will be a gamble.”
