Not all bad: Huawei outlines corporate social responsibility push

Not content with breathing down Ericsson’s neck in the telecoms equipment space and making huge gains in the global smartphone market, Chinese giant Huawei now has its sights set on becoming a leader in corporate social responsibility, but maintains it’s definitely not part of a soft power push.

Speaking at a media event in Hong Kong on Wednesday, the firm’s head of CSR, Holy Ranaivozanany, revealed that it would be extending its Telecoms Seeds for the Future project to Australia this year.

“We thought that we needed to use the expertise in the company to bring something to the community. After stakeholder dialogue we saw there was a high expectation on us to help local schools and universities improve ICT education,” she said of the genesis of the project.

“There’s a gap between what is learned at school and what is learned in the industry, so we looked at how to bridge that gap. That’s why we launched this program in 2008.”

The project could involve scholarships and internships at local Huawei offices where students get mentored by a Huawei engineers, lectures by Huawei staff at local universities and even the creation of training centres. In Malaysia the firm is spending $30m over several years to build out such a centre, she said.

However, head of international media affairs, Scott Sykes, refuted any suggestions that this global CSR strategy might be part of an effort to soften the image of the company abroad, especially in countries like Oz which have been rather hostile to it in the recent past.

“Our top objective is not soft diplomacy but us realising our responsibility as a leading ICT company. We’re not just selling kit, we’re benefitting the communities we operate in,” he argued.

“In one sense our technology is enriching lives, making affordable high quality broadband services. Beyond that we bring jobs. 150,000 work at Huawei including 50,000 non-Chinese outside China – and that number is growing each day. In addition there’s the ecosystem. Last year we spent $6bn in the US, $3bn in Europe, $3bn in Taiwan and $1bn in Japan, so when we win this ecosystem around our business wins.”

Still, it can’t hurt the firm to show it has the interests of local communities at heart, after all the negative stories of it as a national security risk and shadowy agent of the Chinese government that usually follow it and Shenzhen rival ZTE around, especially in Australia and the US.

Ranaivozanany was even magnanimous enough to say that the firm wasn’t necessarily hoping to train up future Huawei engineers with its Telecom Seeds program, but simply “nurture a pool of talent to … keep the industry going”.

In many ways, Huawei is still learning the ropes when it comes to CSR – something that doesn’t come naturally to Chinese companies.

Ranaivozanany admitted there was “no specific measure of RoI” on Huawei’s CSR efforts, but that it was now “integral to what we do”, while Sykes emphasised that the firm was simply coming good at last on expectations of what a large multi-national industry-leading vendor should be doing in this area.

“We’re still a young company. We were only founded about 25 years ago while some of our competitors were founded 100 years back. Our focus on our core business has probably been to the detriment of other things, like communicating properly,” he admitted.

“We’re not saying we have the best ideas regarding CSR. We acknowledge we’re a newcomer in this area, but we’re building our muscle.”

For the record, Ranaivozanany outlined the “four pillars” by which Huawei defines its CSR activities as follows .

Creating and maintaining reliable networks, especially in the event of natural disasters; helping close the digital divide by connecting those in rural areas; building greener products; and the rather wooly  “realising common development with stakeholders”, which basically means improving the livelihoods of employees and citizens in the countries it operates.