Snubbed giant looks for local partnerships after being banned from the NBN.
Despite the snub by the Federal Government, Chinese giant pledges to ‘buy local’, increasing its Australian procurement by 10% this year,
The telecom giant held two days of procurement workshops with ICT companies in Sydney and Melbourne this week, with hopes of attracting new suppliers,
Partnering with Huawei will mean “opening up its multi-billion dollar global supply chain to local companies,” it said in a statement.
Huawei said it attracted over 100 ICT suppliers to its workshop gig inclduing, smartphone chipset designers, mobile app start-ups, systems integrators, big data analytics, cloud service providers, although did not name any companies in particular.
A company spokesperson was not available for comment when contacted by CN.
Huawei has had mixed luck in the Aussie market, having been first banned from working on the NBN by the Federal Government following fears about associations with the Chinese government.
The telecom giant is now in the fourth largest smartphone vendor globally, also released “world fastest” smartphone, Ascend P2, but Telstra is the only network to carry it. Vodafone is, however, going to exclusively sell its tablet flagged as the “world fastest” later this month.
Most Aussie telcos, retailers stock Huawei lower end pre-paid phones only, a blow to a company looking to aggressively grow its mobile share, globally.
IDC figures show Huawei’s share of smartphone market rose to 10% in second quarter, up 56% on same time a year ago.
