Putin Accuses US of Unfair Competition in High-Tech Sector

The U.S. decision to add Russian supercomputer manufacturer T-Platforms to the list of legal entities that are subject to restrictions on their supply of high-tech products is a manifestation of unfair competition, stated Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting of the Council on Science and Education.

“This is using political leverage to make competition unfair,” said Putin. He added that it is necessary to work more actively with European partners so that they could have more independence in their decision-making, should those partners be interested in working with Russia, reports Russian International News Agency (RIA) Novosti.

At the council meeting, Minister of Economic Development Andrei Belousov explained that T-Platforms had entered into active competition with Chinese and U.S. companies, having begun to operate in the European market and were afterward included in the list by the U.S. Department of State. According to him, a number of steps are being taken through the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to resolve the situation.

On March 8, the Bureau of Industry and Security, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, stated that the Russian company T-Platforms and two of its subsidiaries in Germany and Taiwan would be included in the “Entity List,” which identifies persons and organizations that act contrary to U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.

The BIS decision notes that the bureau “has reasonable cause to believe that [T-Platforms exported] dual-use items controlled for national security reasons … without the required licenses [and] is associated with military procurement activities, including the development of computer systems for military end-users and the production of computers for nuclear research.”

T-Platforms is Russia’s largest manufacturer of supercomputers and pioneers activities that are of strategic significance for the country.

The list also includes globally known All-Russian Scientific Research Center of Technical Physics in Snezhinsk and the All-Russian Scientific Research Center of Experimental Physics in Sarov, both part of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center.

Inclusion on the “black list” means the company will face a “policy of denial” when trying to obtain licenses to export, re-export, or transfer goods and products manufactured in the U.S. or when using U.S. technology in other countries.

The imposed restrictions not only prevent the company from obtaining electronic components in the States, but also prohibit them from ordering chips that have been independently developed by specialists at T-Platforms and manufactured in any factory anywhere in the world, since all factories use U.S. technology.

As I noted in an article in March’s issue of the journal Expert, this signifies for T-Platforms a virtual “ban on the trade”: Without the appropriate hardware components, the production of which is completely under American control, it is impossible to build supercomputers. Moreover, this “ban on the trade” applies not only to the company itself, but also to its leading managers, insofar as the same ban acts on any company with a similar profile that was founded with their participation.