Huawei’s breakthrough in complex technologies such as radio access networking now permits mobile carriers to support multiple communications standard on a single network. Reports Lucy John
A Chinese company, Huawei is the number one producer of CDMA 450 Mgz rural telephony and holds 67 per cent of the worlds share of the technology much of it in the rural, developing world market. Their Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) 450 Mgz equipment is apt for long signal ranges in the rural areas. Huawei is a private company established in Shenzhen in 1987 with a registered capital of only USD $ 27,000. Now, the company has total revenue of over USD $ 40 billion. Since its formation, Huawei has grown so quickly and now employs 30,000 people world wide. It is expanding internationally at an accelerated rate with 65 per cent of sales now coming from overseas markets. Huawei’s over sea sales reportedly increased from USD $50 million in 1999 to USD $ 5 billion in 2005, a hundred fold growth within six years. Huawei has established over 85 over sea branches, research centers and factories and has deployed wireless technologies in over 100 countries, providing services for roughly 1 billion customers. The company, based in Shenzhen, China is the largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment in the world, including switches, gateways, smart phones, tablets, and much more.
It is currently the second largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world, behind only Sweden’s Ericsson. It generated $32 billion in revenue last year, selling its networking technology to such global giants as Vodafone, Bell Canada and Telekom Malaysia. Huawei’s heft has allowed it to pour resources into adjacent markets, such as mobile handset development and data center technology that’s already paying off with new customers and billions more in revenue. Huawei develops products. Some 62,000 of the company’s 140,000 employees work in research and development. Compare that to archrival Cisco, whose total payroll is 65,000 workers. Huawei has a workforce with an average age of 27. Unlike the stereotyped Chinese company, Huawei doesn’t primarily manufacture goods. Its highly educated employees create the routers, switches, and telecom gear that others vendors make. According to Huawei executive, two-thirds of our components come from outside China such as in the U.S. and Europe. The reverse is true for other industry players such as Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, with nearly a third of their telecom equipment also made from China.
While alleging bias in the recent inquiry in its US operations, Huawei says, everybody in the ICT industry should be looked at the same way because, essentially, we all share the same components from the supply chain in exactly the same proportion and way. Huawei is no different from any start-up enterprises in Silicon Valley, he says, pointing out that the company’s growth and development relies very much on our entrepreneurial spirit, the commitment and hard work of our employees, as well as our unwavering dedication to innovation.
And Huawei is a patent machine, with about 50,000 patents filed worldwide. Though accused years ago of pilfering the innovations of Cisco and others, Huawei gets credit these days for breakthroughs in complex technologies such as radio access networking that lets mobile carriers support multiple communications standards on a single network. It also pioneered the dongles that consumers slip into laptops to wirelessly connect to the Web. “Huawei is eager to learn, to gain access to new markets, and is very ambitious,” said X.J. Wang, a former Yankee analyst who covered technology in the Asia-Pacific region. “They want to chase bigger opportunities.” Unlike employees at contract manufacturer Foxconn, which has a factory just across the freeway here, Huawei workers are some of the most highly educated in the country. The average age of the staff is 27.
At the same time, Huawei is also pushing beyond its networking roots. In just a few short years, Huawei has become a force in making cheap mobile phones, sold largely in the developing world, as well as to a handful of prepaid carriers in the United States. It’s now pushing into high-end smartphones, releasing its Ascend P1, a superslim, zippy device with a high-contrast display and a design with soft edges that fade away, meant to evoke an infinite swimming pool. “It makes it look even thinner than it is,” said Hagen Fendler, the chief design director of Huawei’s handset business. Design, he said, “is a major strategic tool for the company to achieve its goals.” Huawei’s testing lab, dubbed the White House by some employees, features state-of-the art equipment to simulate all sorts of conditions that its gear must tolerate before the company releases prototypes to manufacturing.
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