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The $300 Million fine was issued to Seagate by the US Department of Commerce (DOC) for illegally selling hard drives to Chinese tech giant ‘Huawei’
Storage technology company ‘Seagate’ has reportedly been fined for $300 Million for illegally selling hard drives worth $1.1 billion to the Chinese tech giant ‘Huawei’. Issued by the US Department of Commerce (DOC), the fine states that Seagate violated the US export controls established in August 2020.
According to different reports, Seagate sold these hard drives worth over $1.1 billion to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021, without keeping in consideration the fact that the DOC has placed Huawei on its Entity List because of various US national security concerns.
A statement released by the DOC’s Bureau of Industry and Services (BIS) states that the “two other companies capable of making HDDs, indicated that they had ceased sales to Huawei,” however “of the three, only Seagate refused to stop sales and transactions involving Huawei.”
The two other companies termed to be “capable of making HDD’s” in the statement are Western Digital and Toshiba.
The statement released by the BIS states that the $300 million fine issued to Seagate is more than double the profit it has earned from selling hard drives to Huawei. Apart from paying a heavy fine, Seagate has also agreed to a multi-year audit and a five-year suspended denial order.
Seagate, while talking about its sales to Huawei, said that their operations were inline with the trade sanctions as the hard disks sold to Huawei were made on foreign soil.
“We believed we complied with all relevant export control laws at the time, however, we determined that settling this matter was the best course of action,” said Seagate CEO Dave Mosley.
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