Huawei tried to stay away from the spotlight. It seems New York Times found them.
Do you know that it has a sales reached about US$30 billion last year? This top technology company employs an army in China and several hundreds in the heart of silicon valley. Its ShenZhen headquarters should be renamed Huawei city that thousands of businesses — stores, restaurants, real estate agencies, taxi services, laundry services, bus operators — all depend on Huawei to thrive.
The primary competitors for Huawei are Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. These are the companies that make the cell phone towers (called base stations) for the world. They also make equipment that enable your mundane everyday phone conversations possible. Huawei has a very strong market position on third world countries: China, obviously, Africa, south-east Asia, eastern block, etc. They have their eyes set on the first world countries for years now and have started to inch toward these markets.
A gigantic company like Huawei has many subsidiaries, strategic relationships, investments, and partnerships. Most of them are well kept secrets. Information is a weapon and they intend to use it.
It is kind of scary to face a US$30 billion private company that is anything but transparent. Very few people knew what’s going on with Huawei, how it is run, what is its strategies, how much money it makes, etc. To a typical American company, this is very frustrating and unfair. “They can see everything of us. We can’t see anything of them.”
Western companies fear Huawei like western countries fear China. It is a formidable competitor and there aren’t obvious winning strategies against them. Comically, or ironically, this attributes to the westerners’ own failing. Huawei management (or China officials) went to the same MBA schools, read the same books, and had the same information. They exploit the advantages they have and avoided the pitfalls that history taught the world. They wasted little resources on anything other than the pursuit of the stated goals. They are not stupid nor uneducated. Their mistakes became lessons and they kept going.
The winning strategy is rather simple: out execute them.
I did not say it is easy. That’s just life.
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