WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Of The United States William Barr said on Thursday the United States and its allies must think about the extremely unusual action of taking a “controlling stake” in Finland’s Nokia ( NOKIA.HE) and Sweden’s Ericsson ( ERICb.ST) to counter China-based Huawei’s supremacy in next-generation 5G wireless technology.
FILE IMAGE: U.S. Attorney General William Barr shows up for U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in your house Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S. February 4,2020 REUTERS/Leah Millis/POOL
In an amazing declaration highlighting how far the United States might want to go to counter Huawei Technologies Co, Barr disclosed in a speech at a conference on Chinese financial espionage that there had been propositions to fulfill the concerns “by the United States aligning itself with Nokia and/or Ericsson.”
Barr stated the positioning might occur “through American ownership of a managing stake, either directly or through a consortium of private American and allied business.”
” Putting our large market and financial muscle behind one or both of these companies would make it a much more powerful competitor and remove issues over its staying power, or their staying power,” Barr said.
” We and our closest allies definitely require to be actively considering this approach,” he included at the event hosted by Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Research Studies (CSIS).
Both firms have a combined market capitalization of about $50 billion and it is not clear what source of funds the U.S. government could potentiall