From the Wall Street Journal, December 25:
Founded in 1987 by former army engineer Ren Zhengfei, Huawei
Technologies Co. is a Chinese colossus. The world’s largest supplier of
telecom equipment and the No. 2 maker of mobile phones, its technology
touches virtually every corner of the globe, and its massive R&D
budget has made it a leader in 5G technology. Yet it has long faced
scrutiny. Here’s how it found success.
Dialing Up
Huawei’s carrier business—which supplies the nuts and bolts of the
telecommunications market to networks around the world—has always been
the company’s heart and soul. Its enterprise business, which includes
cloud computing, and its consumer businesses, selling smartphones and
other gadgets, are growing fast.
Huawei got its start supplying telecom gear to rural areas of China,
which remains its biggest market. Huawei later spread to other
developing markets before capturing a significant share of Europe’s
telecom market. A security center that scrutinizes its telecom equipment
helped win over U.K. authorities, but it remains effectively locked out
of the U.S., where it is considered a security threat, which Huawei
denies. It still operates in more than 170 countries and employs 180,000
people.
In its early days, Huawei was accused of stealing technology. Now it
has the biggest R&D budget of any tech company in China, last year
pouring $13 billion last year into developing its own technologies,
outpacing Intel Corp. and spending almost as much as Google parent Alphabet
Inc. Huawei says that 80,000 people—45% of its employees—work on
R&D. They make chips, design phones and work on 5G technology.
Huawei in 2015 became the world’s biggest maker of networking
equipment—gear like base stations, routers, modems and switches. Its
rise has alarmed some officials in Washington, who say its products
could be used to spy on Americans and allies. Washington has never
proved the claims and Huawei has long denied them.
Huawei doesn’t just dominate in telecom equipment—it wants to sell
you the phone that connects to that equipment, too. Earlier this year,
it surpassed Apple Inc. to become the world’s No. 2 vendor of smartphones world-wide, behind only Samsung Electronics
Co. Devices like the P20 feature top-of-the-line photography, helping
shake the image of Chinese-made gadgets as cheap knockoffs....
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