Seagate has agreed to pay $300 million for shipping hard drives to Huawei, in violation of US export laws.
According to Reuters, Seagate shipped some 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei for roughly a year after the US placed export restrictions on tech shipments to the embattled company. The US put the restrictions in place in August 2020, but Seagate continued shipping hard drives to Huawei from August 2020 till September 2021.
Well after “its competitors had stopped selling to them … Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei,” Matthew Axelrod, Commerce Depart Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement. “Today’s action is the consequence.”
For its part, Reuters reports that Seagate believed it was operating within the law, since the hard drives it sold to Huawei were foreign-made and not reliant on US tech. Nonetheless, the company believed settling was the prudent course of action.
“While we believed we complied with all relevant export control laws at the time we made the hard disk drive sales at issue, we determined that … settling this matter was the best course of action,” Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said in a statement.
