In less than a decade, allegedly thanks in part to billions of dollars in support from the Chinese government, the privately held Huawei has become the world’s largest telecom equipment company, last year posting more than $107 billion in revenue from operations in some 170 countries. “For the first time, people realized Huawei was not just the cheap option but could compete on quality and price,” said Dexter Thillien, a telecommunications analyst at Fitch Solutions.įast-forward to now. Suddenly it had cutting-edge technology of its own and was elbowing aside established European giants like Ericsson and Nokia in their own backyard. Huawei was no longer just another Chinese catch-up clawing out market share thanks to cut-rate pricing or thriving on stolen intellectual property. To many in the wireless industry, it was a coming-of-age moment for Huawei, and for China. The Chinese upstart eventually completed the world’s most ambitious network swap ahead of schedule and under budget. The same year, Huawei landed an even bigger and more unexpected contract to completely rebuild and replace Norway’s mobile phone network, which had first been built by the global standard-bearers: Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia of Finland. For Oslo, Norway, Teliasonera made an audacious and unexpected choice of who would build it: Huawei, a Chinese company with little presence outside China and some other developing markets. A decade ago, in 2009, the Swedish phone giant Teliasonera set out to build one of the world’s first fourth-generation wireless networks in some of Scandinavia’s most important-and technologically savviest-cities.
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