Sunday, March 27, 2011

Huawei Strategy

Source: Caing.com

I've posted briefly on Huawei on their open letter to US & VHA decision. According to the post, a Huawei executive mentioned that they need to change their strategy and I fully agree with them.

"A product- or technology-centered approach to corporate strategy is correct in an era of insufficient supply,"  "But in an era of excess supply, (strategy) needs to have customer demand at its center."


Also, Huawei successfully transformed the mobile & telco industry. There was a day, when the vendors demand hefty prices for the equipment, software price, license charges & maintenance charges. I remember a classic example where we started negotiation with an European vendor for UAT Charges. After Huawei entered in to the market, the situation became more and more competitive and they effectively commoditized the hardware market.

Some key points from the report.

* Huawei plans to work with major customers to jointly develop "customer innovation centers," assigning staff members with expertise in various product lines and technical factors to work directly on-site with customers and so far they've setup in Vodafone, Telefonica & China Mobile.

* Increased focus on terminal. Revenues of the division grew 24 percent from 2009 to US$ 4.5 billion last year, and now comprise 16 percent of the company revenues.

* Cloud computing is another arena and they want to be in the top 3 players. And at a press conference, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei said his company's cloud platforms would "catch up with and surpass Cisco's in not too long a time."

Though I believe in Huawei abilities, my concern will be on their execution & their image.

Their biggest problem is execution and typically in communication & process. Most of the times either the communication breaks or mis-interpreted or totally missing. While the process seems to be very fluid and different project managers seems to follow different structures. This was evident in the mail from Telekom Malaysia CEO letter to Huawei Chairman in last year.

"Image" is another challenge for Huawei. They have to handle it and it's pretty sensitive...




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