In September CEO Ren Zhengfei said his company was willing to license its 5G business to a third party in order to ease spying fears. Now Reuters reports that Huawei is in early-stage talks with several U.S. telecoms companies about said licensing, citing Vincent Pang, senior vice president and board director at the company.

There are some companies talking to us, but it would take a long journey to really finalize everything. They have shown interest — Vincent Pang

“Currently there are no U.S. 5G providers and European rivals Ericsson and Nokia are generally more expensive“, the report notes. It is not known how long these talks will last or whether they will actually materialize in a deal, which could be both a long-term deal or a one-off transfer. In case of the latter, Pang noted that the R&D costs involving continuously improving the platform would be very high for the third party company.