Over the next three years, the Chinese government will stop using foreign computers and software. This was ordered by a directive issued in recent months by the Communist Party, the only one admitted in China, and which has only been known in recent days thanks to some articles that have appeared in Western newspapers such as the Financial Times and the Bloomberg news agency. . Among other things, the decision will be a big problem for the many Western tech companies doing business in China, even if the damage is hard to quantify at the moment.
According to information gathered by the Financial Times, the replacement will be completed by 2022: 30 percent of foreign computers and software will be replaced in 2020, 50 percent in 2021 and the remaining 20 percent in 2022. This is the first time that The Chinese government makes such a decision in the field of technology, although Bloomberg noted that as early as 2014, Xi Jinping's government intended to abandon much of the foreign technology used by banks, the military, government agencies and public companies .
The measure taken in recent months is a next step forward, which can be read both as a retaliation for the decision of US President Donald Trump to prevent Huawei, a powerful Chinese telecommunications company that has been at the center of a delicate case for months. international, to do business in the United States (although the enforcement of the ban has been postponed several times); and as part of Xi Jinping's plan to make China independent from a technological point of view, one of the sectors on which it was lagging behind until twenty years ago.
According to the calculations of the Chinese investment bank China Securities, the government will have to replace between 20 and 30 million computers in the next three years. It is currently unclear how many overseas computers are used by Chinese government offices. According to some analysts consulted by the Financial Times, already today many offices tend to use Lenovo devices, especially after he bought the division that produces IBM desktops about fifteen years ago (although some components of Lenovo products are still manufactured abroad. , such as Intel processors and Samsung hard drives).
Instead, it will be more complex to replace foreign software due to the absence of valid Chinese alternatives: even today most Chinese developers design software compatible with the two most popular operating systems in the world, Microsoft's Windows and Apple's macOS, both from the United States. Chinese operating systems such as Kylin, which has been based on Linux open source technology for some years, are currently much less popular.
Brock Silvers, an analyst at investment firm Adamas Asset Management contacted by Bloomberg, explained that companies that make profits on large numbers like Microsoft “are undoubtedly concerned” because their turnover in China – from € 135 billion to € 135 billion. year, for US companies only – could drop significantly. However, much of the revenue is generated by the private sector, and it is still unclear how much this could be affected by the new measures.
