Despite having the third-highest mobile phone shipments after Samsung and Apple, and being one of the highest selling telecom equipment vendors, Huawei's brand and image are nearly non-existent.
A notion the company plans to fix in this year, armed with a billion dollars for brand promotion. Huawei will spend 2% of its revenue on promoting the company's image in 2013 and plough back variable portions of profits it makes on specific products into advertising them, said Shao Yang, chief marketing officer, device segment.
"We have been like an ostrich with its head in the sand. We are now taking our head out." In 2012, the company recorded revenue of $35.4 billion and targets overall growth of around 10% this year.
Apart from that, Scott Sykes, the company's head of international media affairs, said that Huawei this year stands at the brink of another important transformation as it did when it chose mobile business over fixed line nearly two decades ago.
Huawei is entering into competition with enterprise device makers like Cisco and Ericsson to tap the over trillion dollar industry of information technology equipment for corporate use, such as routers and switches. However, overcoming the brand perception of the company that resonates as unsecured and unreliable will be key for the company.
"The retailing if IT is a whole different thing. In telecom, every country has a few operators and so the people you deal with are few. With IT there are millions of companies ," said Sykes. As a result, Huawei is currently working on establishing channel partners and vendors for greater reach.
Ironically, in India and the US, Huawei does not expect to grow its business too much from the current $1 billion levels.
(The reporter was in Shenzen at the invitation of Huawei)
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