‘There’s no way the US can crush us,’ Huawei founder claims.

Huawei’s founder has come out fighting against the U.S. government after he claimed that “there’s no way the US can crush us.”

Ren Zhengfei,  who founded the telecom company in 1987, doesn’t often make public statements, but, in a rare interview with the BBC, he defiantly claimed that Huawei’s business is growing stronger amid pressure from the U.S. government, which is pursuing criminal charges over alleged business dealings in Iran. Under those charges, CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested during a trip to Canada.

“The world needs Huawei because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we could just scale things down a little bit,” Ren told the BBC via a translator. “Because the U.S. keeps targeting us and finding fault with us, it has forced us to improve our products and services.”

Ren called the arrest of Meng — his daughter, who may be extradited to the U.S. — a “politically-motivated act [that] is not acceptable.”

“There’s no impact on Huawei’s business due to Meng Wanzhou’s loss of freedom, in fact, we are growing even faster,” he said. “They may have thought that if they’ve arrested her, Huawei would fall but we didn’t fall. We are still moving forward.”

By Jon Russell.

Full story at Tech Crunch.