The manicured lawns and carefully sculpted buildings of Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為科技) headquarters are a far cry from the sweatshop image of southern China’s factory belt.
In place of rows of migrant workers hunched over production lines or sewing machines, engineers hover in front of NASA-style giant screens pinpointing any problems in the technology giant’s global network of telecoms systems.
Across the Silicon Valley-style campus, besuited executives wander through a training center designed by British architect Norman Foster, while potential customers are wowed by new electronic gadgetry in a huge showroom.
“[The campus shows] we are trying to look like an international company,” said Ross Gan (顏光前), Huawei’s head of corporate communications.
Huawei, which was founded just 21 years ago by a former People’s Liberation Army engineer, is the kind of company China needs if it wants to shift its economy from being the world’s workshop to a creator of genuine global brands.
The country has enjoyed a staggering boom in the last 30 years by churning out cheap toys, clothes and gadgets.
But for the past 10 years it has been looking to emulate Japan and South Korea, and move from cheap processing of other people’s ideas to nurturing a new Sony or Samsung. But Chinese brands still do not roll off the tongue.
Huawei, whose core business of manufacturing goods like mobile phones for foreign firms and providing huge technology infrastructures remains intact, is at the forefront of this attempt to shift direction.
Last year it made 1,737 patent applications, more than any other company in the world, but Gan said the key to the company’s success as a brand depends on transferring those into profitable products.
It produces one of the world’s leading dongles, a device that allows laptop users to get Internet access wherever they are, and has created an Islamic cellphone that gives a daily Koran reading and points users toward Mecca when they need to pray.
The firm is part of efforts in Guangdong’s factory-belt to change growth models.
The annual Fortune magazine list of the world’s top 500 firms by revenue this year included a record 34 from China excluding Hong Kong. However, all of them were state-owned and operating in often restricted markets or monopolies.
Xu Yan (徐岩), an associate professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s business school, said the protected or monopoly-controlling state-owned behemoths have prevented China from developing new brands.
“The state-owned companies are slow,” Xu said.
But times are changing, he said.
“Many high-tech companies, like Huawei, cannot survive if they do not innovate,” Xu said.
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