Mahmoud Ahmad

Saudi Gazette

 

DOHA — In a highly competitive market yet economically tight environment, product quality matters most to grow, Paul Michael Scanlan, business and network consultant in Huawei said.



In an interview with the Saudi Gazette on the sidelines of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Telecom World 2014 in Doha, he said that Huawei, erstwhile unknown, became a leading global ICT solutions provider and telecommunications equipment company when “we changed the type of product that we put in the market.”



He said three years ago, the company changed the strategy and decided not to be a product in matters of cheap price “making cheap handsets.”  “We are going to be a strategic and quality company,” he said, so “we changed the type of product that we put in the market.”



Since then, the company started to see improvement in the business, and even considered two directions to take. “We could follow Apple and Samsung in the way they do branding. They spend several billion dollars in marketing. We saw the problem with Nokia, Ericson and Motorola, and we saw them reached a high level and dropped quickly,” Scanlan stated.



Huawei decided to do it step-by-step and carefully,  he noted.



“We decided that instead of spending money on marketing how big and good we are, we do it by word-of-mouth. Whether that is a good strategy or not, let the market decide.



What we want to do is to be here in the long term,” he disclosed, and the record speaks for itself now.



He said the company rather adopted an educated optimism and expanded the horizon. “We are not trying to be number one. We see that as being dangerous. We want to put more money in research and development and more money in helping partners and we want to put more money into the ecosystem.”



Now the China-headquartered Huawei employs between 148,000 to 150,000 people globally and operates in 147 countries. Some 70,000 of the workforce are in research and development, which make Huawei the largest contributors in the industry, Scanlan further said.



“The reason behind Huawei’s success is through innovation. We are number three behind Samsung and Apple,” he averred.



Penetrating the Middle East market, which “has a very high expectation” necessitates innovative products, he added.