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The Trump administration has added smartphone maker Xiaomi (OTCPK:XIACY, OTCPK:XIACF) to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, sending its Hong Kong-listed shares down 10.6% on Friday. The move means that Xiaomi is now subject to a November executive order restricting American investors from buying the company’s shares or related securities.
Statement from the DoD: “The Department is determined to highlight and counter the People’s Republic of China’s Military-Civil Fusion development strategy, which supports the modernization goals of the People’s Liberation Army by ensuring its access to advanced technologies and expertise acquired and developed by even those PRC companies, universities, and research programs that appear to be civilian entities.”
Response from Xiaomi: “The company reiterates that it provides products and services for civilian and commercial use. The company confirms that it is not owned, controlled or affiliated with the Chinese military, and is not a ‘Communist Chinese Military Company’ defined under the NDAA.”
Xiaomi’s stock has more than doubled in the past 12 months and it has been rapidly gaining market share. In the third quarter of 2020, it surpassed Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) to become the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, according to Gartner and Counterpoint Research.
Go deeper: Xiaomi has not been put on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which restricts companies from exporting U.S.-origin technology to firms without a license. That means Xiaomi will be able to continue using chips from Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and the Android operating system (GOOG, GOOGL).
Recent reports from the WSJ suggested that Alibaba (NYSE:BABA), Tencent (OTCPK:TCEHY) and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) have been spared from the Defense Department’s blacklist.
A tech and healthcare coalition that includes members like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and U.S. nonprofit Mayo Clinic are working together to create a COVID-19 vaccination passport. The Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) would allow businesses, airlines and countries to check if people have received a coronavirus vaccine to “demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy.”
How would it work? “VCI’s vision is to empower individuals to obtain an encrypted digital copy of their immunization credentials to store in a digital wallet of their choice. Those without smartphones could receive paper printed with QR codes containing W3C verifiable credentials.”
Some hurdles: Privacy and ethical concerns surround whether a person who can prove they are vaccinated should have more freedoms than someone who is not. Another obstacle is getting health centers to participate. Even if they would want to, they would need resources to incorporate these credentials to VCI’s digital standard (people in the U.S. are currently given paper cards when they get their COVID-19 vaccines, while patient information is logged in their state immunization registries).
Looking abroad, Israel is launching a “green passport” program to residents who have received a vaccine or those who have recovered from COVID with antibodies. The passport will lift some restrictions, including mandatory quarantine following exposure to an infected person or traveling abroad, and may even be used for visiting malls or attending cultural and sporting events. The country of 9M people has been lauded for deploying what is currently the fastest COVID vaccination campaign in the world, with 25% of its citizens inoculated with a first dose in just three weeks, as well as 72% of its population over the age of 60.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who President-elect Joe Biden has named as his top medical adviser, has also suggested in recent weeks that a COVID vaccine passport might issued in the U.S.
BlackBerry (BB +22.6%) and Facebook (FB +2.1%) are in the process of a global settlement of their disputes, according to media reports.
A court filing discloses that the two companies are in advanced talks: “The parties are in the process of implementing a global settlement agreement that will resolve all claims and counterclaims in this action.”
BlackBerry had sued Facebook in 2018 over patent infringement; that suit covered Facebook’s widely used messaging capabilities in the core Facebook app, Instagram and WhatsApp.
More litigation followed that year when Facebook sued BlackBerry over its mobile patents, including voice messaging technology as well as mobile delivery of graphics, video and audio.
And later Facebook won a review of BlackBerry’s photo tag patent, and BlackBerry won a review of a security patent of Facebook’s.
