Duxbury Networking has been appointed the sole South African distributor for Huawei Technologies, a Chinese networking and allied products vendor. Established in 1988, Huawei is a communications equipment vendor, providing customised network solutions for optical, fixed, mobile and data communications networks.
According to Duxbury MD, Graham Duxbury, Huawei is targeting its routing/switching offerings at applications in the Internet, voice over IP (VOIP) and wireless market segments.
It is also looking to create a presence in SA in the call centre market with its integration technologies and high data capacity, remote access solutions.
"Huawei represents the new breed of Chinese high technology vendor," says Duxbury. "It is in the vanguard of the Chinese technological revolution and has set its sights on capturing a major share of the business that has been traditionally dominated by a select few vendors, such as Cisco and Nortel.
Within the Chinese market - which is huge by western standards - Huawei is a dominant player with a list of `firsts` to its credit. For example, Huawei has built the world`s first Universal Intelligent Network (UIN) in Gansu province. The commercial use of UIN is a significant milestone in the telecomms arena and represents a significant boost for Chinese design and development expertise.
Huawei`s marketing manager in South Africa, Ford Yang, says Huawei, while relatively unknown in western markets, has the full support and backing of the Chinese government in its quest to enter new markets.
In order to support its global aspirations Huawei has set up 32 branch offices worldwide. A number of regional headquarters and customer support and training centres have also been established, including one in SA.
"We see SA as a market with significant potential," he says. "We have formed an excellent relationship with Duxbury networking - our sole networking products distributor - and we believe that our offerings will be competitive from both technological and price/ performance perspectives."
Yang emphasises Huawei`s focus on research and development, highlighting the fact that the company employs more that 10 000 R&D staff, while returning 10% of annual revenue into R&D projects.
In 2001 this represented $342 million. One of Huawei`s strengths, adds Ford, it that all its products are based on platforms that feature self-designed (ASIC) chip technology.
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