At the Mobile Carriers Show hosted by the Competitive Carriers Association earlier this week, the senior manager of Huawei’s American carrier sales and marketing, Mr. Maurice D’Souza, announced that the Chinese telecom giant grew its US telecommunication equipment business by around 10 to 15 percent YoY in 2015. He also said that he expects the trend to continue this year, even as major US carriers like Verizon and AT&T have not been doing business with the company because of an incriminatory 2012 report from the US government that expressed concerns regarding Chinese government-funded network vendors like Huawei and ZTE. In fact, the report went so far as to claim that network equipment from the two companies could well be used by the Chinese government to carry out espionage activities against the United States.
While both Huawei and ZTE have categorically and unequivocally rejected such claims, doubts continue to persist in the minds of government officials, bureaucrats and politicians in the country, because of which lucrative business from top-tier carriers continue to remain a distant dream for either of the two firms from China. That being the case, Huawei says it has concentrated on smaller US carriers, which is a strategy that has apparently paid rich dividends over the past couple of years. According to Huawei’s director of wireless-product management in North America, Mr. Patrick Kaiser, the company acquired eight new customers in the US in 2014, taking the total number of telecom operators it does business with to 50, including as many as 30 wireless carriers such as Union Wireless, United Wireless and Pioneer Telecom.
Meanwhile, Huawei’s growth story is not limited only to the American market either. The company’s telecom equipment and consumer electronics businesses have both seen strong growth globally over the past couple of years and its recent earnings call for 2015 revealed a 37 percent increase in net profit on a YoY basis thanks largely to the continuing rollout of LTE networks by several telecom companies worldwide, not to mention the increasing sales of its smartphones and tablets. With momentum on its side, Huawei is now planning to build on that and while the lucrative tier-1 carriers still remain out of its reach, Huawei’s network equipment business is still expected to grow this year according to company insiders, whether or not the US federal government withdraws its damning 2012 report.