Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer, Huawei, has given up its quest to conquer the market for telecom network equipment in the United States, where the company’s sales efforts have been repeatedly blocked by security fears.

“We are not interested in the US market anymore,” Eric Xu, executive vice-president, said at the company’s annual analyst summit recently. The world’s second-largest supplier of network gear by revenue has shifted the focus of expansion away from the US over the past year.

Huawei’s decision ends an aggressive push for business in the world’s largest economy. US security officials and politicians have repeatedly identified Huawei as a threat to US national security — an allegation the Chinese company has consistently denied.

Although Huawei has done business with 45 of the world’s top carriers, it failed to get contracts from any leading operators in the US. Last month, Sprint Nextel, the third largest US mobile network operator, and its Japanese suitor, Softbank, both gave assurances to the House intelligence committee that they would not use Huawei equipment.

In October, a US congressional report officially branded Huawei and ZTE, its smaller Chinese peer, a threat to national security. At the time, Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called on the US Government and private sector companies to shun Huawei and ZTE.

Despite its success in other markets, including the UK, Huawei has struggled in the US for years because of concerns among politicians and security officials about the military background of its founder Ren Zhengfei, a former People’s Liberation Army officer.

In 2008, Huawei retracted a bid for 3Com, a US technology company, after it emerged that the proposed deal would not gain regulatory approval in Washington. Two years later, Huawei bid for a multibillion-dollar contract to supply network infrastructure to Sprint Nextel, one of the top US operators, but lost after the US Government intervened. It also failed to win bids for other US telecom assets and, in 2011, was forced to unwind a $2m deal to buy patents from a US company.

In response to these setbacks, Huawei launched a major US lobbying campaign. It hired a number of senior executives from ailing rivals such as Nortel and Motorola, in an effort to build a big research and development presence.

Ken Hu, a senior Huawei executive, also wrote a passionate open letter calling on the US government to launch a formal investigation, which he believed would clear his company.

But October’s congressional report made it even more difficult for the company to do business in the US, Huawei executives say. As a result, it has halted its expansion there. While Huawei still employs 1,400 people in the US, its R&D headcount has dropped from 800 to 500, and the sales team has shrunk too.

Executives at the company’s consumer and enterprise business-groups said they no longer consider the US to be a strategic market.