Huawei and goodbye A regular column on the information industries

摘要

Some equipment vendors operate primarily in the market for network infrastructure, some primarily in the smartphone market and a very few are prominent in both. One such is Huawei, based in China. It has recently been attracting a great deal of media attention, almost all of which has been highly negative. This is fundamentally because it is a company without a stock market listing and hence public scrutiny that is widely viewed as a willing agent of the Chinese Government, although the company itself claims that it is one step removed. In essence, what is widely believed is that if the government "requests" its co-operation in passing on consumer or business data or, as many suspect, in spying on other countries, Huawei has little choice but to comply.