US authorities have imposed the $300m (£241m) penalty on Seagate, for the shipping of 7.4 million hard drives to China-based Huawei, worth $1.1bn (£883m), the Department of Commerce has confirmed.
The hard drives were sold between August 2020 and September 2021, immediately after the Trump administration imposed a ban on the sale of foreign items made with US technology to Huawei.
Even after “its competitors had stopped selling to them … Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei”, said Matthew Axelrod, assistant secretary for export enforcement at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. “Today’s action is the consequence.”
Axelrod said the administrative penalty was the largest in the history of the agency not tied to a criminal case.
The move is the latest chapter of the trade dispute between Washington and Beijing, which began in 2019, when the US first restricted China’s access to semiconductor technology, banning Hu...