U.S. data storage company Seagate has agreed to pay $300M to settle federal claims that it sold disk drives to China's Huawei in violation of U.S. export control rules.
It's the largest penalty ever imposed by the U.S. Department of
Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which oversees export
controls on blacklisted firms.
- The
agency says Seagate continued to sell hard drive disks, or HDDs, to
Huawei despite the latter's inclusion on a U.S. trade blacklist in 2019.
- While
other top hard disk makers stopped selling to Huawei after that,
Seagate continued to ship over 7.4 million HDDs to Huawei between August
2020 and September 2021, federal regulators claimed.
- Overall, Seagate allegedly sold 7.4 million disk drives to Huawei worth an estimated $1.1B without U.S. authorization, it said.
- Seagate will now pay the $300M over a five-year period, with payouts occurring in quarterly amounts of $15M.
- The
Commerce Department says the penalty is “more than twice what BIS
estimates to be the company’s net profits for the alleged illegal
exports to or involving Huawei.”
