China's Huawei now a global force in telecoms

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 April 2006 14:19

Opinion and Analysis

By 30 June 2005, Huawei said it had obtained 11 UMTS commercial contracts ,and it claimed to be the first vendor to release a UMTS distributed base station. In 1H 2005, Huawei said it delivered GSM mobile softswitches to serve 20 million subscribers to 26 operators in 20 countries. Its CDMA2000 1xEV-DO networks have been deployed in 10 countries including the United States, Thailand, Mexico, Pakistan and Algeria.

Mere numbers do not necessarily equate to technological competence. But just last month HP, one of the lead global players in telecoms OSS software, formed a global partnership with Huawei to "help the world's telecom carriers manage their networks more efficiently and continue to provide the best possible quality of service to their end users."

The two companies will establish an OSS lab in Shenzhen of southern China for joint research and development, testing and validation, and pre-integration of OSS solutions.

You don't get to be taken on as a partner by a major global player like HP without the ability to make a real contribution to the partnership.

And, in December, Huawei Technologies, signed a global framework agreement with Vodafone for the supply mobile network infrastructure. The agreement established the terms and conditions for the supply of Huawei's products and services to any one of the Vodafone operating companies worldwide.

According to Huawei, it was the first time a telecommunications equipment supplier from China has received approved supplier status from Vodafone's global supply chain.

That decision followed two years of certification and testing by Vodafone on Huawei's mobile network product and the agreement bore its fruit this week when the Vodafone operator in the Czech republic awarded Vodafone a contract to supply a UMTS network.

Huawei is now a global hi-tech company with R&D operations in Stockholm, Dallas, Bangalore, Moscow in addition to several facilities in is home country. It claims to have applied for over 8000 patents, 1600 of which have been granted.

Huawei has a massive domestic market, and a huge talent pool from which to draw its - very low cost by Western standards - R&D personnel. No wonder its rapidly growing power, and that of its main Chinese rival ZTE, has been flagged as one of the drivers behind the Alcatel/Lucent merger.