A Chinese company that was established four and a half decades ago to avoid US punishment has been accused of selling goods to Chinese businesses.
Nettrix, a Beijing-based agency established in December 2019, has sold system machines that used Intel and Nvidia’s bits and Microsoft’s technology to sanctioned Foreign companies and organizations, according to a review published by the New York Times on August 4.  ,
The report said all of Nettrix’s top executives came from Sugon, which was sanctioned by the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security ( BIS ) in June 2019. According to the statement, the executives are still working together in Kunshan, Suzhou, with Sugon and other businesses owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( CAS ).
According to a report from the New York Times, Nettrix has sold servers to a number of the same companies as Sugon, and its clients include colleges that house protection facilities and security companies that work with the military and China’s Excellent Firewall.
Nettrix, which is not connected to the CAS, claimed in a statement that it did not assist Sugon in evading US punishment. It emphasized that no regulations were broken by the purchase. After the US sanctioned it in 2019, Sugon claimed to have fired hundreds of employees.  ,
Public information gathered by Asia Times showed that Qin Xiaoning, who was praised as one of 14 “outstanding” Chinese Communist Party people in 2018, led about 200 original Sugon people to type Nettrix in December 2019 in order to maintain access to US computers. In 2022, she received an other reward.  ,
Before 2019, Zhao Lei and Wei Bingqing, vice chairman of Qin and Nettrix, both had worked for Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd. or Sugon.
” It’s a great time to set up Nettrix despite some difficulties”, Qin told the media in an interview in April 2020.
In December 2022, Nettrix had now formed alliances with more than a hundred providers including Intel, Nvidia, Broadcom and VMware. Last month, it became the third-largest visual processing unit ( GPU) client dealer in China, following Inspur and Tsinghua Unigroiup’s H3C.  ,
In March this year, the corporation launched the Nettrix AI Open Lab in Tongxiang City in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province. The facility has 128 artificial intelligence ( AI ) servers, which mainly use Intel processors and Nvidia-made GPUs.  ,  ,
Qin’s leaders
On February 1 this year, Sugon’s director told investors that the business has no ownership relationships, but even business relationships, with Nettrix.  ,
Suma Information Industry Co Ltd and Nettrix, Sugon’s past businesses, were mentioned in a selling brochure when it unveiled its Intel-powered I620-G30 site in 2021. However, the BIS was silent at the time.  ,  ,
In the most recent New York Times article, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who oversees the BIS, was quoted as saying,” This is a very difficult job, and I’m not under any illusions that we are doing it perfectly.”  ,
She claimed that the BIS’s monthly expenditure, which was only US$ 191 million, hindered her player’s work due to limited resources.
Nazak Nikakhtar, a former assistant secretary for industry and analysis at the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration ( ITA ), told Asia Times in an interview in June that the US government should first license a very small amount of trade before conducting the end-use-check before granting more licenses.
In fact, it’s not difficult to trace the officers relations of the top managers of Sugon, Suma and Nettrix.
When Sugon went people in Shanghai in 2014, senior vice president Nie Hua and leader Li Jun, who were then 35, placed in the top three. 19 among 321 key team members eligible to receive investment options.  ,
Sugon sold its total interest in Suma to a company that Nie legitimately represented in July of the same year after the US added it to its Entity List in June 2019. Suma remained a CAS product.  ,  ,  ,
She was Sugon’s vice chairman and Systems Products Division brain just before Qin became CEO of Nettrix in December 2019. The ownership structure of Nettrix has never been made public.  ,
While Sugon (a source of SOE customers), Suma (a manufacturer of computer servers) and Nettrix (a supplier of foreign chips) have been individual companies since 2019, Li and Nie have continued as Qin’s leaders as of now.
According to Hygon’s listing prospectus, which was released in July 2022, the trio are partners in Tianjin Haifu Tianding Technology Partnership ( Limited Partnership ). Hygon now has a market capitalization of 181.2 billion yuan ($ 25.34 billion ).
Through her 1.11 % stake in Tianjin Haifu Tianding, Qin indirectly owned a 0.14 % stake in Hygon. The interest is now for 259 million renminbi.
Sugon’s coming program
Sugon has used Hygon and Loongson computers more frequently than it has in the last four and a half centuries.  ,
Hygon’s X86 computer, which uses AMD’s instruction set infrastructure, is made by Samsung and GlobalFoundries. Loongson’s 3A5000 chipset, which uses the company’s own structures, is made by Taiwan-run TSMC’s lovely in Nanjing, China.  ,  ,
A whistleblower-claiming netizen from Shanghai claimed on July 10 that Sugon may eventually disappear from the system server industry as a result of” some new major changes.”
However, a Zhejiang-based netizen made it clear that Sugon will just continue to sell computer servers powered by local cards and only those that are locally produced.
Read: China bird: Fix symbolic, inadequate US punishment
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