China 2014: The Empire Strikes Back
Posted: December 19, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2013 technology round-up, 2014 technology predictions, anti monopoly, APT1, china, cisco, coolpad, cyber espionage, deloitte fast 500, edward snowden, huawei, ibm, mandiant, meizu, oppo, qualcomm, US, xiaomi, zte Leave a comment
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. At least, if you’re an IT commentator or a vendor with “end of year round-up/next year predictions” stories to sell in to the media.
As a hack whose inbox has been deluged with this kind of dross for weeks now, I’m going to look ahead to 2014 with a more focused question, namely: “how will Western companies fare in China next year, and vice versa?”
Well, first up the signs aren’t looking good for US tech firms. Washington has turned up the anti-China rhetoric fiercely in 2013 and with high profile reports like Mandiant’s finally tying Beijing to cyber espionage, things were already looking tricky for US firms in China.
Then Edward Snowden happened – a gift from heaven for the Chinese government which can now portray itself as victim of spying, not a perp, with an even straighter face.
Expect the backlash to come from Beijing, partly because of this, but also because China has some world class companies of its own now, especially when it comes to networking equipment (Huawei and ZTE), PCs (Lenovo) and mobile devices (all of the above plus Xiaomi, Oppo, Meizu, Coolpad, etc etc), so it can afford to be more self-reliant.
IBM and HP have both announced they’re shedding jobs in the PRC, despite the strategic importance of the market.
IBM just announced a new cloud partnership which will see it team up with Azure partner 21 Vianet to provide managed private cloud capabilities to business customers there, however it admitted in October a 22 per cent sales slump in China. Ouch.
Cisco has seen a recent 6 per cent sales slump in China with John Chambers admitting on a November earnings call: “China continued to decline as we and our peers worked through the challenging political dynamic in that country.”
Then there’s Qualcomm, which counts China as a $1bn market, has worked with countless local OEMs to support their products and yet now finds itself at the centre of an anti-monopoly investigation which could see it fined in excess of $1bn.
The rule in Beijing seems to be; if you can’t beat ‘em (and China still has some way to go before its chip makers are world class), fine ‘em.
Expect more of the same next year.
So what of the great Chinese invasion? I spoke recently to Deloitte TMT partner William Chou about this.
In the hardware space historically only the likes of ZTE, Lenovo and Huawei had a chance to grow their offerings abroad, but with VC firms now splashing the cash, more innovative local firms will be able to invest in R&D and expand their footprint internationally, he argued.
Coolpad, Meizu and Xiaomi, to name but three, could be names to watch for 2014.
“There are a lot of these smartphone manufacturers but the ones which will be winners are not really the handset manufacturers but the ones which can combine hardware, software and internet services, like Xiaomi,” Chou told me.
Others he mentioned included a Shenzhen-based handset firm looking at JVs in France and South Africa and an unnamed private company “aggressively” looking to expand in the European market.
On the internet side there are fewer potential breakaway global brands which could make a real impact in 2014.
Tencent’s WeChat is definitely one of them, although Chou argued that Google-beater Baidu will struggle as it seeks to “re-engineer its business model from search to mobile internet”.
There are also a host of little-known software and online firms under-the-radar ready to pounce, including one of the China’s online travel giants which is looking to acquire in Germany, Chou revealed.
In fact, the recently announced Deloitte Fast 500 list of fastest growing APAC start-ups had more companies from the Middle Kingdom than any other represented, although none made the top ten.
Going into 2014 entrepreneurs who are able to “apply technology to other industries” will stand the best chance of success, Chou said.
“China has an ageing population and a one-child policy so healthcare is a serious problem, so how you apply e-health will be a trend,” he explained. “Another major challenge is pollution, so clean tech will be a major area for entrepreneurs to consider as well.”
Whatever happens, things are never quiet in this part of the world. Let’s see what you’ve got 2014.
No news is bad news for Apple in China
Posted: September 11, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apple, china, china mobile, cupertino, forrester, huawei, iphone 5C, iphone 5S, iphone launch, lenovo, meizu, smartphone, xiaomi Leave a comment
So there it is. Apple’s much publicised Beijing iPhone launch event ended. With no news.
It appears that the fruit-themed company, while claiming that China will be its biggest market soon, does not believe it’s THAT important. At least yet. All the poor hacks were offered was a video of last night’s US launch. Ouch.
More importantly for Cupertino, the prices it has stuck on its new 5C and 5S devices will mean only the most hardy fanboys and girls will want to buy them. The iPhone 5C is definitely not budget, so it will fail to appeal to the mass low-end market currently consuming smartphones in China and India like there’s no tomorrow.
A 5C will retail for between 4,488 and 5,288 yuan ($733-864, £466-549). Compare this with the price for the high-end 5S in the US ($649-849) and you can see why some commentators reckon it will fail in the PRC.
It’s certainly not enough to beat Xiaomi’s impressively spec’d Mi-3 at 1,999 yuan ($326).
Forrester analyst Bryan Wang told me that it needs to come down to 2,999-3,499 yuan in order to “eat up the market share” of the likes of Huawei, Lenovo and Meizu, but that at present prices, the local Android players will be “really relieved”.
However, Apple is likely to have left itself some breathing room. It’s plan? Test the market out with these inflated prices and then “lower the price after a couple of months”.
Apple’s other hope of gaining much needed market share in China come from a possible tie up with the world’s largest operator, China Mobile, which has over 700 million subscribers.
No announcement was made at the Beijing press “conference” today but Wang believes it will come, when the carrier has a 4G network to announce. The reason? The 5C and 5S both support TD-LTE, a standard China Mobile helped to build.
APAC the key to Micr-okia success
Posted: September 6, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apac, asha, brands, china, huawei, IDC, india, lumia, M&A, micromax, microsoft, nokia, smartphone, zte 1 Comment
It was Microsoft and Nokia’s big week this week and I’m sure the two will be hoping to hog the headlines going forward as much as they did over the past seven days. Now some might have unkindly described the alliance as “the sounds of two garbage trucks colliding”, but I’ve been getting the low down on why the deal should matter to APAC, or more realistically, why APAC should matter to Microsoft.
Let’s get one thing straight, APAC is essential to Microsoft’s future success in the smartphone space, not just because it has the world’s largest and fastest growing market – China and India respectively – but because Nokia has a really good legacy footprint there thanks to its feature phone biz.
The problem for Redmond, however, is that we’re not talking about feature phones any more, but smartphones. These markets are increasingly demanding smartphones, albeit low-end handsets, not feature phones. It’s why local players like Huawei, ZTE, Micromax and others are growing at such speed.
Nokia’s stock is greatest in India, where it has been voted most trusted brand for two years in a row, despite on-going tax problems with the authorities. Yet according to IDC’s Melissa Chau its relationship with operators isn’t particularly great anymore, so to large extent Microsoft is going to have to start from scratch here.
Building a budget Lumia will be vital and Chau told me Microsoft could do two things to help achieve this:
- Remove licensing charges – at the moment it’s built into the cost of the phone – which would wipe about $10 off per handset
- Use its combined internal expertise now with software and hardware to tweak Windows Phone so that it can run on hardware specs more suited to a lower price point.
It also needs to sort out Asha, she told me, starting with making the handset more attractive by sticking some Microsoft apps on it, and then hopefully in time transitioning those customers to a low cost Lumia.
This ain’t gonna be easy. The competition is fierce out there and with Nokia’s star waning and a severe lack of apps in the ecosystem the best Redmond can probably hope for is cementing it in third place behind the deadly duo of iOS and Android. With four of the Lumia’s top selling markets in APAC (including no. 1 and 2) however, it must make the region a priority.
Time will tell how successful it is, of course, but time, as we all know, is probably something Micr-okia doesn’t have.
Huawei the crouching tiger ready to bare its enterprise fangs
Posted: April 25, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apple, BYOD, carrier networks, enterprise IT, huawei, Huawei Device, Huawei Enterprise, huawei global analyst summit, network infrastructure, samsung, shenzhen, smartphone Leave a comment
I spent the first part of the week at Huawei’s global analyst summit just across the border in sunny Shenzhen. There wasn’t an awful lot of news per se, but a good many bold financial predictions from the fast-growing firm, which is trying to manage the unheard of triple whammy of success in carrier, enterprise IT and consumer device markets.
No firm has managed to succeed in all three, but Huawei is certainly going the right way about it. The firm stands third in the worldwide smartphone market, is breathing down Ericsson’s neck in the carrier space and has big plans to grow its enterprise business. On that front we heard the firm expects 45 per cent growth this year, and a CAGR of around the same to reach $10bn in revenue by 2017.
It’s not all hunky dory at the Shenzhen headquartered vendor though. Alternate CEO and EVP Eric Xu effectively said at the event that it had given up on the US as a potential growth market. Now that’s not to say it wouldn’t like that to change in the future, but given the intractable stance of Congress on this it’s not likely. So where’s the enterprise growth to come from?
Analysts told me developing markets like Indonesia and Myanmar represent potential but not immediate revenue growth at the moment – for that it needs to tap developed regions. China still represents the major slice of the enterprise pie for Huawei and that’s all dandy, but there are mutterings that local government spending may tighten in the near future, which would be bad news for the firm.
“In enterprise, Huwaei is strong in the networking and infrastructure segment. It also has other products around unified communications, contact centre and security, but overall market share is very small outside China,” Frost & Sullivan analyst Pranabesh Nath told me.
“Like the Japanese firms of the post-world war era, it is mostly positioned as a value oriented player, but is trying to improve its products to move up the value chain.”
A potential roadblock on this journey is a perceived lack of clarity around its product lines, according to IDC’s Ian Song. He said the Fusion datacentre brand in particular has caused some confusion amongst the analyst community, which view Huawei’s enterprise message as a “work in progress”.
That said, its technology is sound, R&D spend is massive and it’s got a great base to start with its strength in the carrier space. IBM, Cisco, HP et al won’t be breaking into a sweat just yet but they’d be foolish not to see the crouching tiger hidden in plain sight.
On the device front, we heard from CMO Shao Yang about Huawei’s plans to shift 60 million smartphones this year. This won’t exactly propel it into the top two among Samsung and Apple, but it’s a pretty clear statement of intent. In this industry, brand perception is all-important, and it’s something Huawei, which didn’t really have a brand until it launched the Ascend line last year, has historically struggled in.
That said, it’s learning fast and the high-end handsets its coming out with are pretty slick, so expect a whole lot more on the marketing front this year and an increasing number of Huawei-branded devices to manage as part of your BYOD strategy.
Not all bad: Huawei outlines corporate social responsibility push
Posted: March 21, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: australia, china, CSR, environment, green IT, huawei, ICT education, mobile, smartphones, telecoms equipment 1 CommentNot 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.
ZTE in 2013: do smartphone designers dream of electric sheep?
Posted: February 1, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blade runner, CES, china, Chinese new year, FBI, Grand S, hagen Fendler, HD, hong kong, huawei, Iran, shenzhen, smartphone, telecoms equipment, zte, ZTE Grand Memo Leave a comment
I popped down to ZTE’s pre-Chinese New Year lunch for journos in Hong Kong earlier this week to see what the world’s fifth largest smartphone maker had to say for itself.
It’s not been an easy year for it or Shenzhen rival Huawei, who were both named as a national security risk in a US congressional committee report released at the tail end of 2012 in the bi-partisan hubbub typical of pre-election months.
In addition, ZTE has been under lengthy investigation by the FBI on suspicion of selling embargoed US-made tech to Iran and then covering it up when found out. Then there were the false rumours of swingeing job cuts at the firm and a $5bn cash injection from the Chinese government.
Despite its problems, however, ZTE remains on the move in the smartphone space, an innovator in telecoms infrastructure with its LTE offerings and has plans to grow the enterprise business despite the kind of government roadblocks put up in Australia, the US and now India.
Head of handset strategy Lv Qian Hao battled manfully with the flu to show me the firm’s latest high-end handset, the 5.7in Grand Memo (no pics I’m afraid). It comes across as a smallish version of Huawei’s massive six-incher the Ascend Mate and probably benefits from not being quite as large – in other words I could just about use it as a phone without looking daft.
In the rapidly developing smartphone space, specs like 13 megapixel camera, quad core 1.7Ghz Snapdragon processor and a 720p screen – specs which might once have elicited gasps of awe from the assembled masses – are now pretty standard at the high-end.
This is no criticism of ZTE but it certainly makes its job of climbing up the smartphone rankings and a goal of 50 million shipments this year that bit harder.
So where can it differentiate? Well, with high-end specs almost commoditised now, design is obviously one key area. With the best will in the world ZTE is not know for its beautiful design, but it’s hoping to change that with Hagen Fendler on board.
Pinched from cross-town rival Huawei, Fendler’s appointment and a new design centre in Shanghai certainly serve to highlight the firm’s vaulting ambitions in this space.
Fendler explained that his job is to create a design DNA which can be seeded throughout the firm’s handsets to help create a brand identity. It got off to a flyer with the launch at CES of the Grand S, an HD handset which at 6.9mm is currently the world’s thinnest.
It won’t be an easy job creating handsets that are both beautiful and distinctively “ZTE” but with 400 staff working on design alone, they’ve as good a chance as any.
It can be a frustrating time for a journalist talking to a designer, because so many of the concepts they tend to reference are abstract, ethereal and emotive rather than the nuts and bolts practicalities of engineering.
However, Fendler did reveal that much of his design inspiration comes from outside the immediate environs of the smartphone space – from books, magazines and films.
1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner was singled out for particular praise for sparking interesting ideas about “how humans interact with the technology around them”.
Just don’t expect to see the ZTE Blade Runner phone anytime soon. Actually, Google already got there with the Nexus, didn’t it?
China 2013: What to expect from its tech giants in the Year of the Snake
Posted: January 3, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: big four, canalys, china, china US stock market, chinese tech innovation, diaoyu, google, huawei, lenovo, senkaku, sina weibo, TCL-alcatel, tencent, US, zte 1 Comment
Just finished an interesting piece on what to expect from Chinese tech firms in 2013 so thought I’d précis the key points below.
To be honest as with any year end predictions to an extent there’s always more-of-the-same than anything else, and to that point there’ll be greater international expansion on the mobile handset front by ZTE, Huawei, Lenovo, and potentially TCL-Alcatel.
Aside from the big names, Canalys analyst Nicole Peng told me there could also be attempts by feature phone vendors like Gionee and K-Touch to make it overseas, claiming that the technical and business support offered by chipset companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek is making it easier than ever to break into new smartphone markets.
But away from hardware, what about China’s growing raft of web companies?
It would be easy to write a story saying “the Chinese are coming, look out Facebook, Twitter et al!”, but the honest truth is that the likes of Tencent, Sina, Alibaba and others have become successful in China in part by copying their US rivals and in part thanks to local restrictions banning their rivals.
Where they have done well is in localising their platforms for the domestic user – something Alibaba and Baidu are doing now even for their mobile OS platforms – and innovating on top of what has gone before.
Aside from the odd service like Tencent’s WeChat which has managed to cross the Great Firewall to acceptance elsewhere, I’m sceptical that these firms will expand successfully in 2013, and to an extent, with less than half of the vast Chinese population online, there’s probably enough untapped growth left domestically to keep them busy for now.
Peng is slightly more optimistic, however.
“Many of the local mobile services/applications we have seen in China, such as Tencent Weixin, Sina Weibo provide great user experience and innovative features that we could not find from the international big name,” she told me.
“As long as they continue to innovate and own their IPs, I do not see Chinese internet companies having any major disadvantages in competing, as mobile services become device/OS agnostic in the future.”
Perhaps. But with local incumbents like Twitter, Facebook, Google et al, mature Western markets will certainly be too tough a nut to crack.
On top of this, Chinese tech firms will have to put up with increasingly hostile attitudes from various national governments.
National security concerns will continue to dog Huawei and ZTE on the telecoms infrastructure front, and there are signs that US regulators may soon begin the process of de-registering Chinese firms from US stock markets for failing to comply with domestic securities laws.
Oh, and there’s the small matter of a potential conflict over that bunch of barren rocks known as Diaoyu/Senkaku.
Plenty to look forward to, then, in 2013!
MediaTek and the battle of the budget quad cores
Posted: December 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 28nm chips, china, chips, huawei, LG, mediatek, mobile, MT6589, quad core, qualcomm, smartphones, SoC, Sony, Taiwan, US Leave a comment
Last week Asian chip giant MediaTek launched its latest System on a Chip design, the 28nm quad core MT6589. Before you click on to something more interesting, here’s why it should make anyone with a mobile phone sit up and take notice.
First, MediaTek. It’s probably the most ubiquitous chip company you’ve never heard of. Asia’s biggest and the fourth largest fabless chip company by revenue globally, it lists LG, Huawei, Sony and others among its clients. Until now the firm has largely been focused on the 2G feature phone market, especially in China where demand was huge until recently, but this announcement sees it really break out into the high end smartphone space.
The analysts I spoke to pretty unanimously agreed that MediaTek and arch rival Qualcomm between them are making a seriously disruptive play in the mobile space. Put simply, MediaTek is making quad core affordable by sticking CPU, GPU and wireless modem on the same SoC, which means the MT6589 will end up in plenty of cheap smartphones as well as some higher end ones.
The result? The big brands are going to have to differentiate on something other than quad core. In effect, as IDC analyst Teck-Zhung Wong told me, it’s going to kick off a whole new round of price competition, which is great for users and will spur the industry forward to keep on innovating, which is good for all stakeholders.
In the background there’s also the tussle between Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Qualcomm is doing amazing things this year and now sits third by revenue in IHS iSuppli’s new ranking of global chip companies. It has already produced a quad core aimed at the same market and has an advantage in its modem capabilities, which even MediaTek admitted to me. So it’s Taiwan versus the US in the battle of the budget quad cores. MediaTek historically has that huge customer base in China to tap and is likely to be faster to market but Qualcomm is catching up and apeing many of MediaTek’s technical advantages and customer relations strategies.
The jury’s out but it will be an interesting 12 months to see who the smartphone winners and losers will be.
Meet Huawei, the not so hidden dragon
Posted: September 22, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: BT, china, Congress, cyber espionage, huawei, shenzhen, smartphones, spying, telecoms, US Leave a commentI’ve just spent a fascinating two days with Huawei in Shenzhen. If you haven’t heard of the firm you will soon – it’s the world’s number two manufacturer of telecoms kit, powering all the UK mobile operators and BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media’s fixed line operations.
It’s also number six in the mobile devices market globally, with its eyes on a higher position, and has entered the enterprise IT space where it sees big growth potential.
The trip was a chance to see and be impressed by Huawei HQ, a sprawling campus in a suburb of Shenzhen in the south of China next door to Hong Kong, rather than have an opportunity to quiz senior execs on the firm’s roadmap.
The firm has been spending rather a lot of money to show rather a lot of journalists the same thing – well, it can afford to, having made around $32bn last year.
The reason is that despite its best efforts it’s still not winning a huge amount of enterprise custom, its devices don’t have great brand recognition and, most irritatingly for the firm, it’s the subject of a high profile US Congressional investigation into links with the Chinese government.
The US has regarded Huawei with great suspicion and reckons it may have links to the PLA and the Communist Party (via its founder Ren Zhengfei) which make the firm’s products a potential risk to national security.
Needless to say, Huawei’s PR team were more keen to focus on the less contentious part of its story. And it is a very impressive story. Ren apparently founded the firm with a few thousand pounds and today, 25 years later, it has 140,000 employees, makes billions, operates in 150 countries and the average age of employees is just 29.
Yup, not really the impression many might have of the company. Due to its unique corporate structure which makes it wholly employee-owned, staff can retire at 45 if they’ve spent more than eight years with the firm with their share dividends providing a handsome retirement fund.
The analysts are in agreement that it has great technology, bags of patents and huge potential, so is the US just being protectionist?
Well, yes and no. Huawei may open up some of the source code of its products for investigators to scrutinise but apparently the big sticking point is info on how the firm is run, and past a certain point Huawei will not divulge that, so it may be deadlock for some time yet.
Ren is still a member of the Communist Party and for anyone who’s read the book The Party by Richard McGregor, this will be a cause of concern to some foreign governments – although it must be said not to the UK, which has welcomed the firm’s investment with open arms.
Now, I’m not saying I fully agree with all of the book but McGregor speaks very convincingly of the Party as acting “like a large magnet that makes iron filings suddenly cling together as it moves into position above them”, making them “stand to attention when it focuses its attention on them”.
In the end, both the West and Huawei are learning to cope with one another. We’re just starting to understand the firm a bit better and it is beginning to understand the greater level of media scrutiny, demands for more transparency and need for a more media friendly executive board – all of which are pretty alien to Chinese companies.
phil muncaster 