Data Appendix B: Articles used for the coding process In this document, I have bundled the articles used as input for the coding process in Atlas.Ti. I have bundled interviews with Huawei CEOs and rotating chairmen, articles from U.S. based technology websites and articles from Chinese based technology websites. I started the data collection process by looking up trustworthy and popular U.S. based technology websites using Detailed.com and Get.Tech. Following the most popular website mentioned on Detailed.com – TheVerge – I started browsing to this website and I subsequently entered the key search terms as mentioned in the Thesis document. I scanned articles that either discussed Huawei’s platform expulsion from the Android platform or Huawei’s competitive response following the ban. When articles referred to other websites, I used mediabiasfactcheck.com as a tool to judge the objectivity of reporting of the respective websites. For example, this article of TheVerge contains the original source from Reuters, so I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to ensure that the original Reuters source was of high quality. Using this website, I found that Reuters scored very high on “Factual Reporting” and is considered one of the “least biased” websites. However, not all websites listed below could be found on mediabiasfactcheck.com, so I aimed to triangulate the data of sources by using multiple data sources that covered the same topic but described it from a different perspective. For example, most Chinese sources could not be traced by mediabiasfactcheck.com and in general, it is very hard to find if Chinese sources are trustworthy and of high quality. Therefore, I aimed to counter the Chinese articles that did not show up on mediabiasfactcheck.com with U.S. based articles that covered the same topic but that were listed on Detailed.com or Get.Tech or that were deemed as trustworthy by mediabiasfactcheck.com. Moreover, some Chinese sources such as the South China Morning Post scored rather low on the “Factual Reporting” criterium, with a tendency have a pro-China reporting style. Being aware of the possibility of a pro-China article, I aimed to lessen the bias that such an article would have on my data set by balancing the set of articles that covered the Huawei case from a Chinese perspective with an evenly large set of articles that covered the case from a Western perspective. Through aiming to find linkages between both sets of articles, I tried to counter the bias that some articles would inherently have. After having sourced the articles listed below, I started the data analysis process by scanning the documents through the lens of my research question “How does a sudden platform closure by a powerful platform owner affect a firm and its value net?”. This way, I focused my attention on paragraphs or sentences that discussed either Huawei’s ban from the Android platform, the implications of such a ban for Huawei and its partners, and Huawei’s responses to this ban. I highlighted the important passages. After having read the articles and having highlighted the important passages, I imported the documents to Atlas.Ti and started the actual coding process. Please refer to Appendix XXX for an overview of the data structure, which contains the first-order items, the second order constructs and the aggregate level constructs of the coding process. The data structure as provided in Appendix XXX served as the input for the results chapter of the thesis. 1 CEO INTERVIEWS Cutress, I. (2019, September 23). Huawei CEO Richard Yu Q&A: “Politicians are Playing Games. Retrieved, April 27th, 2020, from: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14896/huawei-ceo-richard-yu- qa-politicians-are-playing-games Huawei CEO Richard Yu Q&A: Politicians are playing games As the world’s second largest smartphone manufacturer, the growth of Huawei over the last decade has been immense. Last year the company overtook Apple with smartphone unit sales, despite not being in the US market, by offering some of the best hardware and user experiences in a very competitive market. However, being placed on the US Entity List earlier this year has put a dent in that momentum, especially when it comes to talking about flagship smartphones. Huawei launched its new Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro smartphones this week, without Google Play Store apps, with CEO Richard Yu committing over $1B to enhance the Huawei app ecosystem. After the launch event, Richard sat down with a group of press and took some questions. Fighting With One Arm Tied Behind Its Back In recent years, it’s hard to underestimate the effect that Huawei has had on the smartphone industry. The company has two major annual releases: the Mate series brings the latest in chip technology to market, while the P series offset by six months takes the Mate design and puts best-in-class photography inside. Each iteration comes with enhancements to the core elements of the Huawei ethos: design, performance, and user experience. Huawei is everywhere, except the US. The New Huawei Mate 30 Pro Being based in China, many individuals and users are sceptical about Huawei. The company says that it is 99% owned by its workforce – supposedly around 40% of its 190,000 employees have the equivalent of non-voting shares as part of a trade union, which translates into employee support and end-of-year bonuses, although these trade shares have zero voting power in a traditional sense - management takes the big decisions. Because the shares are technically owned by the union, they are non-transferable, and individuals cannot trade them - when employees leave the company, Huawei/the union buys back those shares for redistribution. Some people cite that Ren Zhengei, one of its founders, was a senior member of China’s ruling Communist Party, and that being in China means having to comply with its data laws and share information with the government. Huawei insists it is not controlled or even directed by the state, just that it complies with all local laws, no matter what the country. Despite playing almost everywhere in the world in smartphones and telecommunications, this scepticism has kept Huawei smartphones out of the US market. The US government, even under the previous administration, saw Huawei as a threat, and its attempt to enter the market in a big way in Q1 2017 was scuppered. Despite not playing in the consumer market in the US, Huawei has a lot of business with American companies. Huawei uses the Google Android operating system in its smartphones, and has been a leading partner in Android ecosystem development for a decade. Huawei uses Microsoft Windows for its PC business. Huawei also has had extensive research facilities in the US under the Futurewei name, and deals with a good number of smaller companies. In Huawei’s own words, ‘we bring a lot of profit to US companies’. All this came to a head earlier this year, when the current administration due to its tariff war with China, placed 80 companies including Huawei on an Entity List, barring any US company (or any company with product development in the US) to work with Huawei without a licence. Almost immediately Google and Microsoft had to cut off all contact with Huawei, and companies with extensive facilities in the US, such as Arm, had to re-examine its product portfolio to see what could and couldn’t be shared with Huawei. More than 100 companies have submitted requests for licences to 2 work with Huawei, however none of those submissions have been approved at this time, despite six months after the initial ban. This has put Huawei, and some US companies, in a bit of a pickle. Despite being as vertically integrated as possible, Huawei relies on several high-profile US companies and US operations in order to produce its products. By being unable to even communicate with Google on official terms places Huawei on the sidelines – open source only, with no way to licence Google services. With no way to work with companies like Microsoft on bug fixes or OS optimization, Huawei’s products could potentially stagnate, and US companies lose out on not only revenue but a strong technically minded powerhouse that has the ability to help improve both sides of the equation. To that end, Huawei has put its resources into overdrive: where it has been reliant on US companies in the past, Huawei is moving to become self-reliant, ultimately removing its connections from the US technology industry, probably to the detriment of the US. As a result, Huawei has been proactive in announcing initiatives such as HarmonyOS (Hongmeng OS), a unified microkernel platform to cover everything from microcontrollers to televisions. Huawei is putting $1B into its own version of the Play Store, known as the App Gallery, to encourage developers to port their apps under Huawei’s APIs and SDKs. The sweetener there is that where Apple and Google take a 30% cut of all sales, Huawei will only take a 15% cut. Huawei is also expanding its AI efforts to more products, as well as the cloud. Unfortunately, HarmonyOS is ultimately not ready for prime-time in smartphones. Huawei’s representatives have been cagey about whether it is suitable for such devices, but in reality, it just isn’t ready for that sort of scale. As a result, for its smartphones, Huawei is turning to the open-source version of Google Android, known as AOSP (Android Open Source Project). At this level, Huawei does not need to interact with Google, but it does not get access to certain Google Services, like the Play Store, because it can’t license them due to the US issue.