Does the word ‘China’ frighten you?
Whilst economically, China presents a whole new world of opportunities, I mean surely you have heard of the If-I-Could-Get-Just-A-Dollar-From-Every-Chinese-I-Would-Be-A-Billionaire dream.
But China also represents a huge, unknown void of What-Really-Happens-There? to its external population.
I believe it is this fear of the great new Asian unknown which plays a big part in the many scandals about Huawei Technologies in recent times.
It is no surprise actually, especially when you put ‘telecommunications’ and ‘espionage’ together in the same phrase – both of which this fast world-dominating telco IT infrastructure organisation is increasingly being known for.
Just this year alone, Australia and the United States have already blocked Huawei from bidding in key telecom projects, citing ‘national security’ as the reason for imposing their blanket veto on China’s largest telecommunications company.
In both cases, Huawei simply shrugged its shoulders and continued their rock & roll into less paranoid markets ie. every other part of Asia (besides Japan) and Canada.
While the USD32 billion revenue company continues to claim to be free of Chinese government influence, adding that it would be would be ‘commercially suicidal to engage in espionage’, sentiments about Huawei are still strongly associated with the words ‘spy’, ‘communist-controlled’ and ‘military secrets’ – as funny as it may sound to some.
And these sentiments are not exactly unfounded because there have been several hacking cases (traced back to Chinese hackers) in projects involving Huawei. The most prominent so far being the cyber-espionage cases that the Canadian federal government fell unfortunate victim to.
However from a business standpoint, it is pretty hard to resist Huawei.
Known in the local telco circles as a dynamic, lean-&-mean, ground-level relevant and ‘advantageous’ IT vendor, Huawei seems to be the most logical business choice for telcos wanting the best of everything.
High-quality, cut-throat affordable and communications side apps are thrown in for free; and the lure of China’s billion dollar consumer market (with Huawei’s connections of course) is also too hard to resist for Western organisations which are looking to Asia as their key market for business expansion.
So as long as there are few (or none) other IT telco vendors that can match these business propositions, it looks like Huawei is here to stay and Nortel’s demise would at least be justified by a worthy victor.
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IT BYTES BACK! says: Communist-links or not, Huawei’s technologies will be changing the way that its story is ‘telecommunicated’.
