Month: November 2020

Materialize, the SQL streaming database startup built on top of the open source Timely Dataflow project, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Lightspeed Ventures.

While it was at it, the company also announced a previously unannounced $8 million Series A from last year that had been led by Lightspeed, bringing the total raised to $40 million.

These firms see a solid founding team that includes CEO Arjun Narayan, formerly of Cockroach Labs, and chief scientist Frank McSherry, who created the Timely Flow project on which the company is based.

Narayan says that the company believes fundamentally that every company needs to be a real-time company and it will take a streaming database to make that happen. Further, he says the company is built using SQL because of its ubiquity, and the founders wanted to make sure that customers could access and make use of that data quickly without learning a new query language.

“Our goal is really to help any business to understand streaming data and build intelligent applications without using or needing any specialized skills. Fundamentally what that means is that you’re going to have to go to businesses using the technologies and tools that they understand, which is standard SQL,” Narayan explained.

Bucky Moore, the partner at Kleiner Perkins leading the B round sees this standard querying ability as a key part of the technology. “As more businesses integrate streaming data into their decision making pipelines, the inability to ask questions of this data with ease is becoming a non-starter. Materialize’s unique ability to provide SQL over streaming data solves this problem, laying the foundation for them to build the industry’s next great data platform,” he said.

They would naturally get compared to Confluent, a streaming database built on top of the Apache Kafka open source streaming database project, but Narayan says his company uses straight SQL for querying, while Confluent uses its own flavor.

The company still is working out the commercial side of the house and currently provides a typical service offering for paying customers with support and a service agreement (SLA). The startup is working on a SaaS version of the product, which it expects to release some time next year.

They currently have 20 employees with plans to double that number by the end of next year as they continue to build out the product. As they grow, Narayan says the company is definitely thinking about how to build a diverse organization.

He says he’s found that hiring in general has been challenging during the pandemic, and he hopes that changes in 2021, but he says that he and his co-founders are looking at the top of the hiring funnel because otherwise, as he points out, it’s easy to get complacent and rely on the same network of people you have been working with before, which tends to be less diverse.

“The KPIs and the metrics we really want to use to ensure that we really are putting in the extra effort to ensure a diverse sourcing in your hiring pipeline and then following that through all the way through the funnel. That’s I think the most important way to ensure that you have a diverse [employee base], and I think this is true for every company,” he said.

While he is working remotely now, he sees having multiple offices with a headquarters in NYC when the pandemic finally ends. Some employees will continue to work remotely, but the majority coming into one of the offices.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Thursday’s edtech deep dive from our own Natasha Mascarenhas.

Right, now through the first of America’s national Q4 feast days, it’s time to get back to business. Namely, the business of VC and startups. Here’s what we got into this morning:

• It’s Cyber Monday, which means that the Internet is going to be annoying today, but the fake-holiday is boosting ecommerce players like Etsy. That should be good news for payments processors incumbent and startup, as well as other ecommerce businesses, again large, small, and even platform-focused.
• Zappos founder Tony Hsieh passed away this weekend. It was a surprise. He was loved.
• The UK is banning China’s Huawei 5G gear next year as Australia condemns China over a different matter. So if you are keeping tally of countries where Chinese tech may no longer be welcome, the list is certainly longer than merely India, which has banned all popular China-built apps from its mobile phones.
• These broader tensions are changing where VCs are investing their money, notably.
• Primer, the fintech helping merchants consolidate the payments stack, raises £14M Series A
• HungryPanda raises $70M for a food delivery app aimed at overseas Chinese consumers
• Firstminute Capital launches second $111M fund, featuring a who’s-who of founders as LPs
• And finally, we are heading into a deluge of IPOs over the next few weeks. So strap in, it’s going to be messy and fun.

This morning, DoorDash filed a new S-1 document, this time updating the market about the price it expects to command during its public offering. The food-delivery giant gave a range of $75 to $85 per share, which would revalue the company sharply higher than its final private price, set during a June Series H that valued DoorDash at $16 billion.

The company intends to sell 33 million shares, raising between $2.475 billion and $2.805 billion in the process. Notably, there are no shares set aside for its underwriting banks to buy at its IPO price.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

After the public offering, DoorDash expects to have 317,656,521 shares outstanding across various classes, giving it a valuation of between $23.8 billion and $27 billion at the two extremes of its IPO range, not counting shares that have not yet vested or are set aside for future employee compensation. CNBC calculates that the company could be worth up to $30 billion on a fully-diluted basis.

What matters more than the raw dollar amounts, however, is what we can learn from them. Let’s get into the guts of the valuation range and find out if it’s bullish or if we should anticipate DoorDash to raise its range before it goes public.

Valuations, ranges

The new DoorDash S-1/A filing, it doesn’t appear to contain new financial information, so we can keep our prior notes on the company’s health and performance in mind. Recall that we were generally impressed by DoorDash’s growth and its improving profitability.

Other on-demand food services are doing well: HungryPanda just raised $70 million, and on the back of Uber Eats’ growth — and optimism that its ride-hailing business will return with the market-readiness of strong COVID-19 vaccines — shares of Uber are at all-time highs.

So you can taste the optimism that DoorDash is riding as it looks to list. Given our take, you would be forgiven for presuming that DoorDash is targeting an aggressive price.

Is it?

GM is backing away from an agreement to take a stake in electric automaker Nikola Corp, marking the collapse of a deal that has been problematic since it was announced just two months ago.

Shares of Nikola plummeted more than 20% in pre-market trading Monday morning.

GM has instead signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to supply Nikola with its Hydrotec fuel cell system. This supplier agreement replaces its previous transaction announcement made on Sept. 8, 2020 to take a 11% stake in Nikola and produce a fuel cell pickup for the company by the end 2022. The investment was valued at $2 billion at the time.

Speculation that GM would pull the plug on the deal has been rampant almost from the start. Just days after GM announced the investment, a noted short-seller Hindenburg Research accused the Nikola of fraud. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened up an inquiry in the matter and within two weeks Nikola’s founder Trveor Milton had stepped down as executive chairman.

Stephen Girsky, a former General Motors executive who was already on the company’s board and who introduced Nikola to GM, took over as executive chairman.

Nikola’s troubles aren’t over. GM’s wording in its announcement suggests as much. GM describes the non-binding MoU as a “potential agreement.” If it goes through, GM would engineer its Hydrotec fuel cell system to the specifications mutually agreed upon by both companies. It is expected that the potential arrangement would be “cost plus,” meaning that Nikola would pay upfront for the capital investment for the capacity. The companies are also discussing the potential of a supply agreement for GM’s Ultium battery system for Nikola’s Class 7 and Class 8 trucks.

Doug Parks, GM executive vice president of global product development, purchasing and supply chain said supplying the Hydrotec fuel cell systems to heavy-duty class of commercial vehicles is an important part GM’s growth strategy and reinforces the company’s commitment toward an all-electric, zero-emissions future.”

GM’s Hydrotec fuel cell system will be engineered at its Michigan technical facilities in Pontiac and Warren and manufactured at its Brownstown Charter Township battery assembly plant, the company said.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new product today. It’s a tiny $5 fan combined with a small heatsink for the Raspberry Pi 4. It works with the official case, below the top cover. That accessory should prevent the Raspberry Pi from overheating.

If you’re not familiar with the Raspberry Pi, it’s a cheap, single-board computer with a lot of connectors that is the size of a deck of cards. You can give it to a kid so they can play around with a terminal, you can use it for your weekend projects as the computing brain and more.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is the most recent Raspberry Pi device in its classic form factor. And it’s a huge performance improvement over the Raspberry Pi 3.

And yet, shortly after its release last year, the community of Raspberry Pi users noticed that the single-board computer tends to get hot. In some cases, it becomes so hot that the device has no choice but to throttle the frequency of the CPU.

That problem is particularly noticeable if you’re using the official case as it prevents proper ventilation. Over the past year, the foundation has released a software update focused on power optimization.

While it solves the issue in some cases, it’s not a magic fix for all situations. Some users tend to use the computing power of the Raspberry Pi for long periods.

There are some third-party cases with a big heatsink. But the Raspberry Pi Foundation didn’t have its own solution for the issue.

According to the foundation, the tiny fan should be enough to prevent throttling. “It draws air in over the USB and Ethernet connectors, passes it over a small finned heatsink attached to the processor, and exhausts it through the SD card slot,” the Raspberry Pi Foundation says.

It’s a cheap stopgap solution, but I hope the Foundation will prioritize heat dissipation for the next iteration of the Raspberry Pi.

European Union lawmakers are considering whether current rules aimed at limiting the practice of geoblocking across the bloc should be extended to cover access to streaming audio-visual content.

Access to services like Netflix tends to be gated to individual EU Member States, meaning Europeans can be barred from accessing libraries of content offered elsewhere in the region. So if you’re trying to use your Netflix subscription to access the service after moving to another Member State, or want to access inventory offered by Netflix elsewhere in Europe, the answer is typically a big fat no, as we’ve reported before.

This undermines the core concept of the EU’s Single Market (and the Digital Single Market — aka the frictionless ecommerce end-goal which rules such as those limiting geoblocking aim to deliver).

The Commission is alive to ongoing issues around online access to audio-visual content. In a review of the two-year-old Geo-blocking Regulation published today, it says it will kick off discussions with the audiovisual sector on ways to improve consumer access to this type of copyrighted content across the bloc.

It says the planned talks will feed its upcoming Media and Audiovisual Action Plan — which aims to help European market players scale up and reach new audiences. However it’s not committing to any specific actions as yet. So whether the push yields anything more nuanced than another ‘no’ remains to be seen. (The movie industry being a blocker to freer digital flows of content is, after all, not a new story.)

“Increased access and circulation of audiovisual content will benefit an increasing demand across-borders, including in border regions and with linguistic minorities,” the Commission suggests in a press release on its review of the current rules.

It notes that on average a European consumer only has access to 14% of the films available online in all the Member States as a whole (the EU27), with “significant variations” by country (such as viewers in Greece having access only to 1.3% of the films available online in the EU, vs those in Germany having access to 43.1%).

Its review also highlights growing demand (especially for younger age ranges) to access audio-visual content offered in other Member States — noting it almost doubled between 2015 and 2019 (from 5% to 9%).

“A 2019 Eurobarometer confirmed that there is interest in gaining access to audio-visual content offered in different Member States,” it adds.

For other types of copyrighted content — including music, e-books and videogames — the Commission sounds less convinced of the need for regulatory reform.

“The Report concludes that a further extension of the scope would not necessarily bring substantial benefits to consumers in terms of choice of content, as the catalogues offered are rather homogeneous (in many instances beyond 90%) among Member States,” it writes, also flagging “potential impacts” on the price of such services in Member States (which can vary).

After 18 months of application of the current Geo-blocking Regulation (in force since December 2018), the Commission review lauds progress in reducing some obstacles — claiming there’s been “a stark reduction in barriers caused by location requirements, from 26.9% down to 14% of approximately 9,000 websites surveyed”.

“Such restrictions prevent users from attempting to register to foreign websites due to a postal address in another Member State, and is important because registration is a key stage of the online shopping process,” it notes.

“A further decrease in restrictions that users faced when trying to access websites cross-border was reported (e.g. users were denied access or automatically rerouted), the remainder of which was residual (only 0.2% of websites blocking access).”

It also credits the regulation with boosting the amount of cross-border delivery purchases, saying the increased access to cross-border websites provided by regulation led to an increase of 1.6% in the EU27 compared to 2015, adding that a third of the surveyed websites offered cross-border delivery.

Commenting in a statement, the internal market commissioner, ThierryBreton, said: “This first review of the Geo-blocking Regulation already shows first positive results. We will further monitor its effects and discuss with stakeholders, notably in the context of the Media and Audio-visual Action Plan to ensure the industry can scale up and reach new audiences, and consumers can fully enjoy the diversity of goods and services in the different EU Member States.”

ServiceNow, the cloud-based IT services company, is making a significant acquisition today to fill out its longer-term strategy to be a big player in the worlds of automation and artificial intelligence for enterprises. It is acquiring Element AI, a startup out of Canada founded by AI pioneers and backed by some of the world’s biggest AI companies — it raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and Tencent, among others — with an aim of building and provisioning AI-based IT services to enterprises, in many cases organizations that are not technology companies by nature.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, but we are attempting to find out elsewhere. Element AI was valued at between $600 million and $700 million when it last raised money, $151 million (or C$200 million at the time) in September 2019.

If it’s anywhere near or around that figure, this deal would be ServiceNow’s biggest acquisition, although it’s not clear that it is.

The spokesperson confirmed that ServiceNow is making a full acquisition and will retain most of Element AI’s technical talent, including AI scientists and practitioners: “Our focus with this acquisition is to gain technical talent and AI capabilities,” she said. That will also include Element AI co-founder and CEO, JF Gagné, joining ServiceNow, and co-founder Dr. Yoshua Bengio taking on a role as technical advisor.

The startup is headquartered in Montreal, and ServiceNow’s plan is to create an AI Innovation Hub based around that “to accelerate customer-focused AI innovation in the Now Platform.” (That is the brand name of its automation services.)

Last but not least, ServiceNow will start re-platforming some of Element AI’s capabilities, she said. “We expect to wind down most of Element AI’s customers after the deal is closed.”

The deal is the latest move for a company aiming to build a modern platform fit for our times.

ServiceNow, under CEO Bill McDermott (who joined in October 2019 from SAP), has been on a big investment spree in the name of bringing more AI and automation chops to the SaaS company. That has included a number of acquisitions this year, including Sweagle, Passage AI, and Loom (respectively for $25 million, $33 million and $58 million), plus regular updates to its larger workflow automation platform.

ServiceNow has been around since 2004, so it’s not strictly a legacy business, but all the same the publicly-traded company, with a current market cap of nearly $103 billion, is vying to position itself as the go-to company for “digital transformation” — the buzz term for enterprise IT services this year, as everyone scrambles to do more online, in the cloud, and remotely to continue operating through a global health pandemic and whatever comes in its wake.

“Technology is no longer supporting the business, technology is the business,” McDermott said earlier this year. In a tight market where it is completely plausible that Salesforce might scoop up Slack, ServiceNow is making a play for more tools to cover its own patch of the field.

“AI technology is evolving rapidly as companies race to digitally transform 20th century processes and business models,” said ServiceNow Chief AI Officer Vijay Narayanan, in a statement today. “ServiceNow is leading this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make work, work better for people. With Element AI’s powerful capabilities and world class talent, ServiceNow will empower employees and customers to focus on areas where only humans excel – creative thinking, customer interactions, and unpredictable work. That’s a smarter way to workflow.”

Element AI was always a very ambitious concept for a startup. Dr Yoshua Bengio, winner of the 2018 Turing Award who co-founded the company with AI expert Nicolas Chapados and Jean-François Gagné (Element AI’s CEO) alongside Anne Martel, Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer and Philippe Beaudoin, saw a gap in the market.

Their idea was to build AI services for businesses that were not tech companies in their DNA, but would still very much need to tap into the innovations of the tech world in order to continue growing and remaining competitive with said tech companies as the latter moved deeper into a wider range of industries and the companies themselves required increasing sophistication to operate and grow. They needed, in essence, to disrupt themselves before getting unceremoniously disrupted by someone else.

And on top of that, Element AI could work for and with the tech companies taking strategic investments in Element AI, as those investors wanted to tap some of that expertise themselves, as well as work with the startup to bring more services and win more deals in the enterprise. In addition to its four (sometimes fiercely competitive) investors, other backers included the likes of McKinsey.

Yet what form all of that would take was never completely clear.

When I covered the startup’s most recent tranche of funding last year, I noted that it wasn’t very forthcoming on who its customers actually where. Looking at its website, it still isn’t, although it does lay out several verticals where it aims to work. They include insurance, pharma, logistics, retail, supply chain, manufacturing, government and capital markets.

There were some other positive points too. Element AI also played a strong ethics card with its AI For Good efforts, starting with work with Amnesty in 2018 and most recently Mozilla. Indeed, 2018 was the year AI seemed to hit the mainstream consciousness (and also start to appear somewhat more creepy, with algorithmic misfires, pervasive facial recognition, and more “automated” applications that didn’t work that well), so this definitely made sense.

But for all of that, it seems that there perhaps were not enough threads to need a bigger cloth as a standalone business.

“Element AI’s vision has always been to redefine how companies use AI to help people work smarter,” said Element AI Founder and CEO, Jean-Francois Gagné in a statement. “ServiceNow is leading the workflow revolution and we are inspired by its purpose to make the world of work, work better for people. ServiceNow is the clear partner for us to apply our talent and technology to the most significant challenges facing the enterprise today.”

The acquisition is expected to be completed by early 2021.

Drugmaker Moderna has completed its initial efficacy analysis of its COVID-19 vaccine from the drug’s Phase 3 clinical study, and determined that it was 94.1% effective in preventing people from contracting COVID-19 across 196 confirmed cases from among 30,000 participants in the study. Moderna also found that it was 100% effective in preventing severe cases (such as those that would require hospitalization) and says it hasn’t found any significant safety concerns during the trial. On the basis of these results, the company will file an application for emergency use authorization (EUA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday.

Seeking an EUA is the next step towards actually beginning to distribute and administer Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, and if granted the authorization, it will be able to provide it to high-risk individuals in settings where it could help prevent more deaths, such as with front-line healthcare workers, ahead of receiving a full and final regulatory approval from the U.S. healthcare monitoring agency. Moderna will also seek conditional approval from the European Medicines Agency, which will enable similar use ing the EU.

Moderna’s vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, which provides genetic instructions to a person’s body that prompts them to create their own powerful antibodies to block the receptor sites that allows COVID-19 to infect a patient. It’s a relatively new therapeutic approach for human use, but has the potential to provide potentially even more resistance to COVID-19 than do natural antibodies, and without the risk associated with introducing any actual virus, active or otherwise, to an inoculated individual in order to prompt their immune response.

In mid-November, Moderna announced that its COVID-19 vaccine showed 94.5% efficacy in its preliminary results. This final analysis of that same data hews very close to the original, which is promising news for anyone hoping for an effective solution to be available soon. This data has yet to be peer reviewed, though Moderna says that it will now be submitting data from the Phase 3 study to a scientific publication specifically for that purpose.

Moderna’s vaccine candidate is part of the U.S’s Operation Warp Speed program to expedite the development, production and distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine, initiated earlier this year as a response to the unprecedented global pandemic. Other vaccines, including one created by Pfizer working with partner BioNTech, as well as an Oxford University/AstraZeneca-developed candidate, are also far along in their Phase 3 testing and readying for emergency approval and use. Pfizer has already applied with the FDA for its own EUA, while the Oxford vaccine likely won’t be taking that step in the U.S. until it completes another round of final testing after discovering an error in the dosage of its first trial – which led to surprising efficacy results.

Apple’s marketing of iPhones as ‘water resistant’ without clarifying the limits of the feature and also having a warranty that excludes cover for damage by liquids has got the company into hot water in Italy.

The Italian competition authority (AGCM) has informed the tech giant of an intent to fine it €10 million for commercial practices related to the marketing and warranty of a number of iPhone models since October 2017, starting with the iPhone 8 through to the iPhone 11, following an investigation into consumer complaints related to its promotion of water resistance and subsequent refusal to cover the cost of repairs caused by water damage.

In a document setting out the AGCM’s decision dated towards the end of October — which was made public today (via Reuters) — the regulator concludes Apple violated the country’s consumer code twice because of what it characterizes as “misleading” and “aggressive” commercial practices.

Its investigation found Apple’s iPhone marketing tricked consumers into believing the devices were impermeable to water, rather than merely water resistant — with the limitations of the feature not given enough prominence in ads. While a disclaimer stating that Apple’s warranty excludes damage by liquids was deemed an aggressive attempt to circumvent consumer rights obligations — given its heavy promotion of the devices as water resistant.

Apple places a liquid contact indicator inside iPhones, which changes from white or silver to red on contact with liquid, and checking the indicator is a standard step undertaken by its repair staff.

The AGCM report cites examples of consumers who’s iPhone had taken a “short dive” in the sea being refused cover. Another complainant had been washing their device under the tap — which Apple deemed improper use.

A third reported that their one-month old iPhone XR stopped working after coming into contact with water. Apple told them they must buy a new device — albeit at a subsidized price.

While an iPhone XS user, with a one-year old handset who reported it had never come into contact with water was refused coverage by Apple support who said it had, complained to the regulator there’s no way for a consumer to prove their device was not immersed in water for more than the length of time and depth to which Apple’s small print specifies it has water resistance.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the AGCM’s findings.

The tech giant has 60 days from the date it was notified of the regulator’s intent to fine to appeal the decision.

The size of the penalty is well under half of the operating profit the regulator says Apple’s Italian operation made in the year September 2018 to September 2019, when it note it recorded revenues on its sales and services of €58,652,628; and an operating profit of €26,918,658.

Two years ago Italy’s competition watchdog also fined Apple and Samsung around $15M for forcing updates on consumers that may slow or break their devices. While, this February, France fined Apple $27 million for capping the OS performance of iPhones with older batteries.

Apple has also faced much larger penalties from competition authorities elsewhere in Europe — including being notified of a $1.2BN fine by France’s competition authority in March this year, which accused the tech giant of operating a reseller cartel along with two wholesale distribution partners, Ingram Micro and Tech Data.

Apple also had to stump up as much as €500M in back taxes demanded by French authorities last year.

While some $15BN from Apple’s European HQ is sitting in an escrow account to cover a 2016 European Commission ‘State Aid’ charge that it illegally benefited from corporate tax arrangements in Ireland between 2003 and 2014.

In July Apple and Ireland won the first round of an appeal against the charge. But the Commission filed an appeal in September — meaning the case will go up to the CJEU, likely adding years more of legal wrangling.

EU lawmakers are continuing to work on pushing for global reform of digital taxation, while some Member States push on with their own digital taxes.

The UK government has squeezed the timetable for domestic telcos to stop installing 5G kit from Chinese suppliers, per the BBC, which reports that the deadline for installation of kit from so-called ‘high risk’ vendors is now September.

It had already announced a ban on telcos buying kit from Huawei et al by the end of this year — acting on national security concerns attached to companies that fall under the jurisdiction of Chinese state surveillance laws. But, according to the BBC, ministers are concerned carriers could stockpile kit for near-term installation to create an optional buffer for themselves since it has allowed until 2027 for them to remove such kit from existing 5G networks. Maintaining already installed equipment will also still be allowed up til then.

A Telecommunications Security Bill which will allow the government to identify kit as a national security risk and ban its use in domestic networks is slated to be introduced to parliament tomorrow.

Digital secretary Oliver Dowden told the BBC he’s pushing for the “complete removal of high-risk vendors”.

In July the government said changes to the US sanction regime meant it could no longer manage the security risk attached to Chinese kit makers.

The move represented a major U-turn from the policy position announced in January — when the UK said it would allowed Chinese vendors to play a limited role in supplying domestic networks. However the plan faced vocal opposition from the government’s own back benches, as well as high profile pressure from the US — which has pushed allies to expel Huawei entirely.

Alongside policies to restrict the use of high risk 5G vendors the UK has said it will take steps to encourage newcomers to enter the market to tackle concerns that the resulting lack of suppliers introduces another security risk.

Publishing a supply chain diversification strategy for 5G today, Dowden warns that barring “high risk” vendors leaves the country “overly reliant on too few suppliers”.

“This 5G Diversification Strategy is a clear and ambitious plan to grow our telecoms supply chain while ensuring it is resilient to future trends and threats,” he writes. “It has three core strands: supporting incumbent suppliers; attracting new suppliers into the UK market; and accelerating the development and deployment of open-interface solutions.”

The government is putting an initial £250 million behind the 5G diversification plan to try to build momentum. behind increasing competition and interoperability.

“Achieving this long term vision depends on removing the barriers that prevent new market entrants from joining the supply chain, investing in R&D to support the accelerated development and deployment of interoperable deployment models, and international collaboration and policy coordination between national governments and industry,” it writes.

In the short to medium term the government says it will proritize support for existing suppliers — so the likely near term beneficiary of the strategy is Finland’s Nokia.

Though the government also says it will “seek to attract new suppliers to the UK market in order to start the process of diversification as soon as possible”.

“As part of our approach we will prioritise opportunities to build UK capability in key areas of the supply chain,” it writes, adding: “As we progress this activity we look forward to working with network operators in the UK, telecoms suppliers and international governments to achieve our shared goals of a more competitive and vibrant telecoms supply market.”

We’ve reached out to Huawei for comment on the new deadline for UK carriers to stop installing its 5G kit.