206 U.S. companies have applied for the special licence.

In an interview with Bloomberg, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has stated, licenses for U.S. companies to sell components to Huawei Technologies Co will come “very shortly,”.

Licenses “will be forthcoming very shortly” and that the U.S. government had received 206 requests.

“That’s a lot of applications – it’s frankly more than we would’ve thought,” said Ross.

Huawei did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

In May 2019, the United States Commerce Department placed Huawei under an Entity List citing national security concerns, thus requiring U.S. companies to have a special license if they wanted to continue their trade relations with the Chinese company.

In June, U.S. President Donald Trump had promised to provide some relief to the firms that were affected by the trade ban.

With reference to the U.S.-China trade negotiations, Ross said there was no reason why a deal could not be on track to be signed this month.

“We are in good shape, we are making good progress, and there is no natural reason why it could not be,” said Ross.