Of the world's three largest smartphone makers, two — Apple and Samsung — are ubiquitous to the American consumer. Other brands, such as LG, have their phones, but Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy lines are well recognized as both the best and most popular in the American marketplace.

But the third-largest smartphone manufacturer is Chinese giant Huawei (pronounced wah-WAY), a company that registered $60.1 billion in revenue in 2015 and is the world's largest telecom equipment maker. That revenue number represents a 35 percent increase on the previous year.

Huawei's smartphone division is growing at such a pace that it may overtake Apple for the No. 2 spot in the global market in about two years.

Yet Huawei is largely unknown in the United States by the everyday consumer. That's not because Huawei has limited ambitions to enter the American market.

Since 2012, Huawei has effectively been banned from setting up its equipment in the U.S. due to concerns about possible cyberespionage on behalf of the Chinese government. Huawei vehemently denied the allegations in front of a U.S. House committee that year. Early in 2013, Huawei and fellow Chinese telecom company ZTE were officially banned from selling to U.S. government agencies.

If a recent report in The New York Times is accurate, Huawei could come under additional scrutiny from Washington.

ZTE was punished earlier this month by the U.S. government for circumventing export laws and selling U.S. goods to Iran. As a result, proposed sanctions will make it much harder for American suppliers to do business with ZTE. However, those restrictions may be loosened some in the coming weeks.

Internal ZTE documents released by the Commerce Department suggest that Huawei, listed in the documents by the euphemism "F7," may have engaged in similar practices to get around U.S. trade law, setting up off-shoot companies that appear independent but work with American suppliers to deal with embargoed countries like Iran, North Korea and Syria.

The Commerce Department declined comment on The New York Times story making the Huawei-ZTE link, so it's not known whether Huawei will be reprimanded in a similar way in the near future.

The report does come at a time when, despite the U.S. network equipment ban, Huawei is beginning to enter the U.S. consumer smartphone space with its flagship smartphone, the Mate 8, and is the manufacturer of the Google-branded Nexus 6P.

Yet, even if regulators don't find from the ZTE documents that "F7" worked around U.S. trade law, Chinese companies like Huawei could be impacted by political events in America.

With the American presidential primaries for the two major parties lasting through the spring, trade debates have taken on a new importance in the 2016 election cycle — a far cry from the trade politics of the 1990s and 2000s, which were dominated by free-trade policies.

In particular, candidates like Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and likely Democratic runner-up Bernie Sanders have targeted China as unjustly taking advantage of Americans with lower-cost labor and goods.

As it applies to smartphones, the bombastic Trump said in early March, "I'm going to bring jobs back. I'm going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China." Trump has also threatened to place a massive 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports coming to the U.S.

Even Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who is more associated with pro-trade positions than Sanders or Trump, is against the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal — of which China is not a party to but has expressed some possible future interest in— despite previously backing the agreement as Secretary of State in President Barack Obama's first term.

No matter what, the future in American trade policy will almost certainly make it harder for Huawei to gain as much of a foothold in the United States as it has around the world. And with it, the network equipment giant and smartphone manufacturer will likely stay anonymous to the average American tech consumer.