Huawei’s EU friends will stay on the line for now

LONDON: Telecom supply-chain bosses can either stick or twist. Now that the United States has added leading telco-kit maker Huawei Technologies to a trade blacklist, European operators like Vodafone Group and Telefonica need to decide whether to pivot to other manufacturers, or hope for the best. On balance, the latter makes more sense.

Ditching Huawei’s smartphones from 5G launches, as BT Group and Vodafone have already done, is the easy part. Those handsets would be useless to Europeans who favour apps from Google, which like all American companies is barred from transacting with groups on the U.S. Department