By Emmie V. Abadilla The blacklisting of Huawei in the United States may affect the Chinese firm's supply chain, but it will have "little impact in the Philippine telecommunications industry," the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT)  stated. Recently, the United States government signed an Executive Order prohibiting US persons and companies from engaging in business transactions constituting “any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology or service” with any company owned or controlled by a “foreign adversary” as a means of protection from US national security risks. The EO did not specify the names of the companies/persons blacklisted, but Huawei was one of the companies affected. Because of the executive order, American companies cannot supply Huawei with software and hardware components. However, telcos in the Philippines have already made pronouncements they will diversify their present and future equipment procurement to make their networks more robust and future proof, the DICT pointed out. "On matters of cybersecurity, the incumbent telcos are to this day still strictly monitoring their network and up to now there was no incident of a national security breach from their respective network predominantly using Huawei equipment." The DICT pledged to "continue to require local telecommunication companies to monitor their networks through world-class cybersecurity audit teams and assure the government that their respective network will not be compromised or they may suffer losing their license to operate."