Huawei Technologies Co (華為技術), China’s largest phone-equipment maker, is betting Google Inc branding and smartphones targeting the lower end of the market will build its sales in Europe.
Huawei’s unveiling on Thursday of a £99 (US$152) Google-branded smartphone will help the company grab market share in Europe, Tim Watkins, the company’s western Europe vice president, said in an interview in London.
Huawei has not yet named the operators who will first offer the Ideos phone, which carries a Google logo and doubles as a portable wireless Internet hotspot.
The Chinese phone-equipment maker is trying to build market share and revenue outside of its home region while overcoming security concerns.
The Shenzhen-based company, founded by a former Chinese military official, failed in talks to buy two US assets in July on sellers’ doubts about regulatory approval, two people familiar with the matter said last month.
Google’s Android operating system became the third-best-selling mobile operating system in the second quarter, with 17.2 percent of sales compared with 1.8 percent a year earlier, researcher Gartner Inc said. Apple’s iOS dropped to fourth place. Nokia Oyj’s Symbian and Research In Motion Ltd ranked first and second.
“We think the big growth is going to be in the Android, affordable end of the smartphone market,” Watkins said.
“Huawei has established a very good brand on the infrastructure side,” and is looking to extend that success to the device market, he added.
Apple, Taiwan’s HTC Corp (宏達電) and Research in Motion Ltd are competing for high-end customers with phones that cost as much as £599 without a contract. Android phones will outnumber Apple units by 2012, researcher iSuppli Corp said.
On the network infrastructure side of Huawei’s business, “there are various options available,” including setting up separate local subsidiaries, to allay government security concerns, Watkins said.
“The political stuff is clearly a challenge, but actually in many countries we can point to success,” especially in emerging markets like Africa, he said.
In addition to fellow Chinese companies like China Unicom (中國聯通), Huawei has won contracts to supply equipment to operators including Telstra Corp and Vodafone Group Plc.
In 2008, Huawei dropped a bid for computer-equipment supplier 3Com Corp after the US began investigating whether the deal could give China access to anti-hacking technology used by the Defense Department.
In April, India’s government blocked Huawei and ZTE Corp (中興通訊) from selling network equipment to domestic phone carriers because of security concerns, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said Taiwan’s government plans to set up a business service company in Kyushu, Japan, to help Taiwanese companies operating there. “The company will follow the one-stop service model similar to the science parks we have in Taiwan,” Kuo said. “As each prefecture is providing different conditions, we will establish a new company providing services and helping Taiwanese companies swiftly settle in Japan.” Kuo did not specify the exact location of the planned company but said it would not be in Kumamoto, the Kyushu prefecture in which Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) has a