Huawei

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. in Shenzhen, Guangdong, People's Republic of China is the largest networking and telecommunications equipment supplier in China.

Established in 1988 by Ren Zhengfei, Huawei Technologies is a private high-tech enterprise which specializes in research and development (R&D), production and marketing of communications equipments, and providing customized network solutions for telecom carriers. Huawei serves 35 of the top 50 telecoms operators and puts 10 per cent of revenue into R&D each year. In addition to the R&D centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Xi’an, Chengdu, and Wuhan in China, Huawei also has R&D centers in Stockholm, Sweden; Dallas and Silicon Valley, U.S.; Bangalore, India; Ferbane in Offaly, Ireland; Moscow, Russia.

Huawei

() officially translates in English to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.. The character 华 means the country of China, also can be used as adjective to mean splendid, magnificent. The character 为 means action or achievement. Huáwei itself variously translates as "achievement", "magnificent act" or "splendid act". Such a translation is an etymological curiosity, not to be used generally.

History

Huawei was founded by Ren Zhengfei in 1988, as a distributor of imported PBX products, with an initial registered capital of 24000 RMB. By 1989, Huawei started developing and later marketing its own PBX. After accumulating knowledge and resources on PBX business, Huawei achieved its first breakthrough into mainstream telecommunication market in 1993, by launching C&C08 digital telephone switch, which had a switching capacity of over 10K circuits. Until that time, Chinese domestic telecom companies were not able to build switches with such capacity. Huawei's switches were first deployed only in small cities and rural areas. It eventually gained market share and made its way into major city switch offices and toll service. Other Huawei products also likely have such a history for their adoption, against the competition of then dominating foreign telecom equipment manufacturers.

In 1994, Huawei established long distance transmission equipment business, launched its own HONET integrated access network and SDH product line. In 1996, Huawei captured its first overseas contract, providing fixed-line network products to Hongkong's Hutchison-Whampoa. Later, in 1997, Huawei released its GSM product and eventually expanded to offer CDMA and UMTS.

From 1998 to 2003, Huawei contracted with IBM for management consulting, and underwent significant transformation of its management and product development structure. After 2001, Huawei increased its speed of expanding into oversea market. By 2004, its overseas sales had surpassed that of the domestic market. Huawei has a joint venture with Siemens for developing TD-SCDMA products. In 2003, Huawei entered into a joint venture named Huawei-3Com with 3Com for Internet Protocol-based routers and switches, eventually selling its 49% stake to 3Com in 2007 for $US 882 million.

Huawei and American security firm Symantec announced in May 2007 the forming of a joint-venture company that will develop security and storage appliances to market to telecommunications carriers. Huawei will own 51% of the new company, to be named Huawei-Symantec Inc. Symantec will own the rest. The joint-venture will be based in Chengdu.

In May 2008, Huawei joined Optus in developing a mobile innovation centre in Sydney, Australia, aimed at accelerating the adoption of high-speed mobile and wireless broadband.

Products and product deployment

Huawei provides fixed network, mobile network, data communications, optical network, software & services and terminals, including modems --- ranging from switching, integrated access network, NGN, xDSL, optical transport, intelligent network, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, W-CDMA, CDMA2000, a full series of routers and other LAN equipment. Huawei manufactures also mobile phones such as the Vodafone 710 and 716), 3G HSDPA cards (Huawei E620 HSDPA Card is being offered by e.g., Vodafone in the United Kingdom and Telia in Sweden), 3G HSDPA USB modem, Huawei E220. and 3G HSUPA modem stick Huawei E172.

In 2005, Huawei was selected by BT as a preferred supplier of communications equipment for BT’s 21CN network strategy. In the same year, Huawei signed a Global Framework Agreement with Vodafone for mobile network infrastructure. In 2006, Motorola signed a deal with Huawei where Motorola distributes and installs Huawei's 3G equipment. On November 15 (2006), Huawei signed a deal worth 30 million euros (US$38.4 million) with German operator Versatel Holding Deutschland GmbH. Huawei will build a fibre-optic communication network based on Internet protocol (IP) for Versatel, Germany's third largest fixed-line operator. On February 1 (2007), Forbes reported that France Telecom has selected Huawei to supply UMTS mobile equipment for its third generation network. Huawei replaced Alcatel/Motorola in Romania, and Nortel in Belgium.

Vodafone awarded Huawei 2007 Global Supplier Award for Outstanding Performance in June, 2007.

On October 29, 2007, Huawei announced a WiMAX Solution

Competitive position

Huawei's global contract sales for 2006 reached USD11 billion (a 34% increase from 2005), 65% of which comes from overseas market. Huawei has now become a leading vendor in the industry and one of the few vendors in the world to provide end-to-end 3G solutions. In 2006, Huawei ranked No.1 in the global NGN market (Infonetics), No.1 in Mobile Softswitch (In-Stat), No. 2 in Optical Network (Ovum-RHK), No.1 in IP DSLAM (Infonetics), No.2 in broadband convergence routers (Gartner), and No.1 in MSAN market (Infonetics).

In 2007, Huawei became the 4th largest patent applicant in the world after Matsushita, Philips Electronics and Siemens with 1,365 applications. It also recorded sales(not contract sales) of 12.56 billion US dollars(an increase of 49% from 2006) for the year, which makes it the fifth largest telecommunication company in the world in terms of revenue after Cisco, Ericsson, Alcatel Lucent, and Nokia Siemens.

Huawei Technologies was included in the World's Most Respected 200 Companies list compiled by Forbes magazine in May 2007, one of the six from telecom industry.

Cisco Lawsuit Against Huawei

On January 23, 2003, Cisco sued Huawei Technologies, Co., Ltd and its subsidiaries, Huawei America, Inc. and FutureWei Technologies, Inc. over Huawei's unlawful copying of Cisco's intellectual property. The suit alleged that Huawei "unlawfully copied and misappropriated Cisco's IOS software... and infringed numerous Cisco patents." Cisco suspended the patent infringement lawsuit on October 1, 2003, after Huawei agreed to modify some of their products.