“We’ve always been considering entering the U.S. market,” Lei Jun told the Wall Street Journal. “We plan to start entering the market by end 2018, or by early 2019.”
It will still need a local carrier to sell its phones and establish traction, which could be a serious obstacle. While another Chinese firm, ZTE, ranked as the fourth-biggest smartphone vendor in the U.S. in 2017, both it and Huawei have received pushback from the U.S. government due to national security concerns. Huawei in fact lost a deal with AT&T to sell its latest Android flagship, the Mate 10 Pro.
