Chapter 19 Open up the European and American markets through cooperation

There is a popular saying in Huawei: "If you want to make progress quickly, go overseas as soon as possible." The expansion of European and American markets poses a challenge to Huawei's demand for talents.In order to knock on the door of the European and American markets, Huawei people have tried all kinds of hardships. Since 2001, Huawei, which has made great progress in developing countries, has set its sights on Europe, which has a highly developed economy.For the development of such a top-level market, Huawei's slogan is "reject opportunism" and "get in, stand firm, and grow big."At the beginning, the progress was not smooth, and it can even be said that we have been repeatedly defeated. Occasionally getting an order of several million dollars is enough to make Huawei feel happy.Despite this, Huawei continues to invest persistently and persistently "repeats defeats and battles".Because Huawei people deeply understand that as a world-class equipment supplier, it must not only have excellent products, technologies and services, but also have a global market, especially a group of top global customers.On the other hand, the orders and contracts of top major customers are huge. Once obtained, it is very important for the stable and sustainable development of equipment suppliers.Although from the current point of view, the European market is not the main source of Huawei's overseas market profits, but the European market undoubtedly has important strategic significance.

Chen Chaohui, representative of Huawei's new UK representative office, told reporters: "When Lucent's sales fell in the past few years, the top ten operator customers contributed US$10 billion in revenue, which shows the importance of large customers to equipment suppliers. Now The value of a single British Telecom order reaches 10 billion pounds. If we have several such large customers abroad, the company’s operations will be more stable and the economies of scale will be more obvious.” Huawei has always appeared as a "price killer" in the international market.However, in the face of the European and American markets, the "coyote" strategy is facing the threat of failure: the European and American markets have long been monopolized by international communication giants, and the "coyote" strategy cannot break through barriers to entry and compete on the same starting line, so fair competition is naturally out of the question .

Later, Ren Zhengfei came up with a "breakthrough plan" to attack the European and American markets: actively seek cooperation with international communication giants, including the establishment of joint ventures and joint research and development. In March 2003, Huawei and 3Com of the United States reached an agreement to establish a joint venture.From the beginning of its establishment, Huawei 3Com shouldered dual functions: From the perspective of market goals, through the joint efforts of the two companies, the joint venture company is expected to maximize the market share of enterprise network products in the Chinese and Japanese markets.From the perspective of market development, the joint venture company can provide OEM products with competitive prices for nearly 50,000 distributors of 3Com in the international market.

A joint venture is also imperative for 3Com. "For 3Com, it is actually more optimistic about Huawei's technological advantages and a deeper understanding of the Chinese market."Industry analysts believe that this is the fundamental reason why 3Com is willing to use US$160 million plus technical product patent licensing and all assets in China to establish a joint venture with Huawei.Huawei puts part of its network assets in a joint venture with 3Com. The purpose is to gain experience in joint ventures and cooperation with international telecommunications giants through cooperation with international companies such as 3Com, so as to enter the coveted mainstream high-end markets in Europe and the United States.

At the end of 2003, a series of new routers from the Huawei-3Com joint venture company came on the scene one after another. Huawei and 3Com took out their long-standing technical capital and started a concerted effort. Even in the overseas market expansion of low-end data communication products, Huawei is also looking for more strategic partners besides 3Com, "Our strategic partners in the Japanese market are NEC and Mitsubishi, and we are negotiating more in Europe. many partners".Zheng Shusheng, president of Huawei 3Com, said in an interview with reporters.Zheng Shusheng's implication is obviously that Huawei 3Com can do OEM for many overseas brands, and 3Com is just one of them.

The TD-SCDMA enterprise of Siemens and Huawei was born on February 12, 2004, with a total investment of 100 million US dollars. Huawei hopes to deepen the cooperation direction into the specific application of technical standards through the business alliance between the two parties on the market and product application levels , thus assisting Huawei's internationalization. At the end of November 2005, Huawei officially signed a global procurement framework agreement with Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator, and Huawei became a strategic supplier of Vodafone. preferred supplier.

On December 26, 2005, Huawei became an equipment supplier of British Telecom.After becoming a supplier of British Telecom's "21st Century Network", Huawei's reputation in the European market has been greatly improved. Reuters, Agence France-Presse and other mainstream European media said that Huawei has risen rapidly and joined the ranks of world-class telecom equipment suppliers. . At the 3GSM Global Conference in Barcelona, ​​Spain in February 2006, Huawei and Vodafone jointly announced that they would provide customized mobile phones to 21 countries where Vodafone operates in the next five years.

For Huawei, this is not only a share of the pie from BT and Vodafone, but more importantly, it has undoubtedly gained a wide The "passport" of meaning is very important for Huawei.Because the recognition of the world's top operators such as British Telecom and Vodafone means that the door to the mainstream European market has been opened to Huawei. Since then, the world's top 50 operators, such as Finnish telecom operators KPN and Telfort, have gradually opened their doors to Huawei.Because as Huawei's customers become world-class customers, Huawei has gradually become world-class in the service process.In the European market, Huawei has long since abandoned the "killer trumpet" of winning at a low price.

In 2006, Telfort CEO Van der Veer described the process of Huawei becoming his partner to the Chinese media.Van der Veer said that Huawei won the Telfort 3G project in 2004 not because of the low price, but because of Huawei's commitment to contract execution and quick response. He said that Huawei's product price was not the lowest in the bidding. In November 2009, Huawei signed a contract with Belgacom, Belgium's largest telecom operator. It will use Huawei's SingleRAN solution and SDR technology to relocate and upgrade all of its 2G/3G networks in Belgium to HSPA+ networks, and will deploy a network covering Belgium LTE commercial network throughout the country.

Tan Zhu, vice president of Huawei's wireless marketing engineering department, has worked hard for four years in Europe, the birthplace of LTE. He has witnessed Huawei's difficult breakthrough in the LTE field.He said with deep emotion: "From TeleSonera, the world's first commercial LTE contract, to Telenor, the largest LTE contract in Europe, to Swedish operator Net4Mobility, and Belgian operator Belgacom Group, Huawei has occupied 62% of the European LTE market." Keeping pace with overseas giants in technological upgrading was once regarded as the goal of struggle by Chinese communication people.In the so-called quasi-4G LTE market, Huawei has achieved this. In January 2009, Huawei and Ericsson announced at the same time that they would jointly undertake the construction of the world's first LTE commercial network for Swedish operator TeleSonera.

It is precisely because network replacement can bring huge benefits to operators that Huawei impresses operators.Since December 2008, Germany's O2 signed Huawei's first SingleRAN order with Huawei.Currently, Huawei has deployed 40 SingleRAN networks around the world.As of the first quarter of 2010, Huawei's fourth-generation base station shipments have accumulated more than 3.9 million carrier frequencies.Since then, based on its performance in TeleSonera LTE network construction, Norway-based Telenor has chosen Huawei as its exclusive wireless supplier to upgrade its existing 2G/3G network in Norway and achieve smooth evolution to LTE.Swedish operator Net4Mobility also chose Huawei as an LTE supplier.For a time, Huawei's performance put tremendous pressure on other equipment manufacturers.With its performance in LTE's native Europe, Huawei has also won the trust of operators in other regions. In October 2010, Huawei made another breakthrough in the European market and signed a five-year strategic cooperation framework agreement with Vodafone Italy, involving an amount of up to 700 million euros (about 970 million U.S. dollars). According to the strategic cooperation agreement signed by the two parties, Huawei will provide Vodafone Italy with a full range of SingleRAN mobile communication solutions, FTTx fiber broadband, and fixed-mobile convergence end-to-end solutions, as well as engineering, construction, and other related services. At the same time, Huawei will cooperate with Vodafone to establish a joint innovation center in Milan, Italy, to jointly carry out more extensive end-to-end cooperation in the fields of mobile and fixed broadband and FMC integration, and promote Vodafone Italy's seamless full-service operation network in the future. Evolution, to further strengthen Vodafone Italy's service provision capabilities and mainstream operator status. The signing of this agreement marks that Huawei has become the main communication solution provider of Vodafone Italy, further strengthening Huawei's leading position in the European high-end telecom market. Vodafone Group is currently the world's largest multinational mobile operator, with operating assets in 31 countries around the world, and partner markets in more than 40 countries, providing network services with its partners.As of the end of 2009, its global mobile subscribers were 341 million, fixed broadband and voice subscribers were 3 million, and its annual turnover exceeded 8.5 billion euros. Wan Biao, executive vice president of Huawei's wireless product line, said that the global mobile communication field is in a transitional period of network convergence and smooth evolution to the future.Huawei will strive to cooperate with more and more world-class operators to deploy future-oriented wireless networks and help operators improve their competitiveness in energy conservation, emission reduction and clean energy.