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(Bloomberg) -- Vietnam is intent on being the first Asean nation to provide a 5G network -- without China’s tech powerhouse Huawei Technologies Inc.
Viettel Group, Vietnam’s largest mobile carrier owned by the Defense Ministry, will deploy Ericsson AB’s equipment in Hanoi and Nokia Oyj’s technology in Ho Chi Minh City, said Viettel Chief Executive Officer Le Dang Dung. It will use 5G chipsets from Qualcomm Inc. and another U.S. company. The carrier, which uses Ericsson and Nokia for its 4G network, is also developing its own equipment, he added.
“We are not going to work with Huawei right now,” Dung said in an interview at the company’s Hanoi headquarters. “It’s a bit sensitive with Huawei now. There were reports that it’s not safe to use Huawei. So Viettel’s stance is that, given all this information, we should just go with the safer ones. So we choose Nokia and Ericsson from Europe.”
Vietnam’s smaller carriers appear to be shying away from Huawei, as well. MobiFone Corp. is using Samsung Electronics Co. equipment while Vietnam Telecom Services Company, or Vinaphone, entered into a partnership with Nokia to deploy its 5G network, according to local media.
“I think Huawei is having difficulties in Vietnam right now, since other companies don’t use them as well,” said Dung, whose carrier has about 60 million customers in the nation of about 96 million people.
The Shenzhen-based company counters such concerns by pointing out that governments and customers in 170 countries use its equipment, which poses no greater cybersecurity threat than communications technology from any other vendor. Huawei expects the U.S. restrictions will lower consumer devices revenue by about $10 billion.
“If we have favorable information regarding Huawei in the future, we will consider using their network equipment again,” Dung said.
The Southeast Asian country is quietly siding with the Trump administration, which has barred Huawei from buying U.S. technology over national-security concerns. Vietnam’s decision to shun Huawei appears to make it an outlier in Southeast Asia, where other countries such as the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia are open to deploying Huawei’s technology.
Dung insisted Viettel’s decision not to use Huawei for its 5G networks was a technological one and not tied to geopolitical considerations.
“We decided not to use Huawei, not because of the U.S.’s ban on Huawei -- we just made our own decision,” he said. “Many other countries, including the U.S., have found evidence that showed using Huawei is not safe for the security of the national network. So we need to be more cautious.”