Bottom line: China’s telcos won’t accelerate their 5G network building even if licenses are issued earlier than expected this year, though foreign equipment suppliers could benefit if Huawei is hobbled by the US-China trade wars.
5G coming to China sooner than expected?
What a difference a decade makes. That’s about how long has passed between China’s issuing of 3G wireless licenses and the upcoming issue of 5G licenses two generations later. I remember in the 3G era how China dragged its feet forever, and finally issued licenses several years after the rest of the world. This time around it appears to be moving more quickly, driven by what appear to be political and economic factors.
The topic has popped into the headlines again this week with word that China’s telecoms regulator will “soon” issue 5G licenses. (English article) The signals coming from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) have been pointing to a release of licenses this year all along. But this could mean that will happen sooner rather than later, since many were previously expecting licenses toward the end of the year. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: The US decision to force a sale of gay dating app Grindr by its Chinese owner reflects a new environment where Washington is almost certain to veto China purchases of local firms with access to sensitive user information.
US forces sale of gay dating app Grindr by Chinese owner
A new report on the unhinging of a Chinese purchase of US gay dating app Grindr is shedding some interesting light on how Washington sees such deals, and offers insight into how far Chinese tech firms might be allowed into the country going forward. The picture isn’t exactly too encouraging, though perhaps some might over-interpret things in light of all the recent trade tensions.
The case also sheds some light on the near-hysteria that seems to be growing daily in the US over telecoms giant Huawei, which is rapidly shaping up as the Chinese boogeyman of the 21st century. The central theme in all of this is that Washington believes China is out to steal private information on Americans any way it can, including through the use of private Chinese companies. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Apple will continue discounting its iPhones in China to stop its sinking market share, which could slow but not halt its decline in the face of growing competition from the likes of Huawei.
Apple’s retail partners pare back China iPhone prices
Following a break of a month, I’m returning to my writer’s seat with discussion of the China outlook for tech giant Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL), which has turned to a very un-Apple-like strategy of discounting its products in the world’s largest smartphone market. China has been a fickle place for Apple, at one point accounting for nearly a quarter of the company’s global sales, as brand-conscious Chinese paid big premiums for trendy iPhones. That’s hardly the case now, with China accounting for just 15.6 percent of Apple’s total sales in its last quarterly report. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: The US case against Huawei’s CFO is likely to end with her release on technical grounds as part of a deal between the US and China, though the company could still face punishment for illegally selling US products to Iran.
Huawei CFO detained for violating US anti-Iran sanctions
It’s a few days old by now, but I wanted to begin the new week by sharing some of my thoughts on the recent blow-up involving telecoms equipment giant Huawei’sCFO, who was detained in Canada at Washington’s request. At this point I mostly want to give my views on the politics behind this story, and also my take on how things are likely to play out.
I’ll start off with the view that this particular story has been a long time in the making, and anyone who thinks it was cooked up by Donald Trump as an excuse to wring concessions out of China is mistaken. I’ll also give my view that this kind of come-uppance for a corporate giant like Huawei is relatively deserved, since Chinese companies have basically thrived and grown as quickly as they have by frequently thumbing their noses at the law. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Huawei’s new push into India looks like a smart and well-timed move to take advantage of the country’s emerging middle class, and could help it take the global smartphone crown by the end of next year.
Huawei takes aim at India
As it creeps up on its goal of becoming the world’s largest smartphone maker, the controversial Huaweiappears to finally be waking up to the potential of the fast-growing India market. That’s the key takeaway from some Indian media reports last week, which quoted a company executive saying Huawei is planning a major push into an India market that it has largely ignored up until now.
The bigger theme in this particular story is that India is quickly emerging as a market not to be taken lightly on the smartphone scene. Global leader Samsung(Seoul: 005930) learned that early on, and until recently was the market leader before getting eclipsed by China’s Xiaomi(HKEx: 1810). I was quite surprised when doing some quick research for this post to learn that India actually passed the US to become the world’s second largest smartphone market in the third quarter, behind only China. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A Bloomberg report on Chinese government spying microchips in hardware used by Apple, Amazon and others may be flawed, but highlights the potential for such spying due to China’s important place in the global supply chain.
Controversy builds over story of China spyware
As I return to blogging after a couple weeks absence, I wanted to weigh in on an explosive story that ran last week in Bloomberg about tiny spying chips that had been secretly loaded by China’s military onto globally used motherboards. Quite a bit has happened since the original story’s publication (English article), which said that tiny custom-made chips developed by the People’s Liberation Army had secretly been installed into motherboards assembled in China by US hardware maker Supermicro (OTC: SMCI).
The story, which went out of its way to quote quite a few unnamed sources to bolster its credibility, went on to say that those motherboards had been used in servers used by a wide range of companies and government agencies, including Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN). Everyone initially applauded the ground-breaking report, which appeared to show how China could easily insert itself into the global high-tech complex by taking advantage of its important place in the hardware supply chain. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Huawei could challenge Samsung for the global smartphone crown in as little as a year, though a potential Achilles heel could be the “outing” of its surging Honor brand that most may not associate with the Chinese parent.
Huawei passes Apple in global smartphone ranks
Smartphone pioneer Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL) has just reported its latest quarterly results, which means that all the data tracking firms can simultaneously release their own industry data showing the latest trends. Those trends show that Apple’s sales were basically flat for in the quarter on a unit basis, even as the bigger story was that the US giant lost its spot as the world’s No. 2 smartphone seller to a surging Huaweiduring the period.
The big picture is less that Apple is losing market share, and more that Huawei is surging in its march toward market dominance. Part of the reason behind the surge is booming popularity for Huawei’s sub-brand called Honor, which perhaps doesn’t carry the same stigma of the Huawei name. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Xiaomi appears to be gaining confidence of investors through moves like its entry into South Korea, but it will take at least another year to prove it really has the savvy to thrive over the longer term.
Xiaomi calls on South Korea
Newly listed smartphone maker Xiaomi(HKEx: 1810) has kept the world guessing these past two weeks with its on-again-off-again performance both on the Hong Kong stock exchange and now in the real world. The former is a reference to its stock, which did quite poorly in the run-up to its trading debut last Monday but has done a U-turn since then and posted some impressive gains.
The latter is a reference to the company’s latest strategic move, which has it launching its low-end smartphones in South Korea. That may not sound like much, since the market is relatively small and Xiaomi already sells its products in more than 70 countries and regions globally. But the symbolic significance is quite large, since South Korea is home to leading global smartphone maker Samsung(Seoul: 005930). Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A brouhaha involving Lenovo’s branding as unpatriotic for not supporting homegrown technology is likely to blow over quickly, and spotlights China’s continued reliance on foreign technology.
Lenovo branded as traitor
In a story that looks like a something from the McCarthy era, embattled PC maker Lenovo (HKEx: 992) has landed at the center of a controversy that’s seeing it branded by some as a traitor for choosing foreign technology over a homegrown Chinese alternative. This kind of thing isn’t at all that uncommon in China, where politics, business and everyday life mix freely.
We’ve seen a few examples of such mixing over the last few months, all involving western companies that were forced to repent after making the egregious error of listing places like Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate “countries” from China on their marketing materials. Such missteps ended up causing outrage by some nationalists on the web, prompting sleepy regulators to step up and demand such places be labeled as part of China. I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, though I did find his branding of this kind of thing as “Orwellian nonsense” as both humorous and also a nice gentle rebuke to China. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A US investigation of Huawei into possible illegal sales of US-made equipment to Iran is old news, and may be getting dredged up now to give Washington leverage in its ongoing trade frictions with China.
Huawei under microscope for potential illegal sales to Iran
Some might argue that US sanctions against telecoms equipment maker ZTE (HKEx: 763; Shenzhen: 000063) are just the prelude to a much bigger story that could now be sharping up, with word that ZTE’s much larger rival Huaweiis being probed in a similar case. The subject at the heart of this matter involves sales of American-made equipment to Iran, which would have violated earlier US sanctions against such sales to pressure Iran to curtail its nuclear program.
In fact, I’m quite surprised that this probe against Huawei is coming back into the headlines just now. Media reported on this potential probe as early as 2013, at the same time reports first emerged about a similar probe into ZTE. Additional reports appeared about a year ago saying an unnamed company was being investigated for violations similar to ZTE, with strong hints that the company was Huawei. (previous post) Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Foxconn’s taking of the smartphone manufacturing crown from Samsung reflects the resurgence of Apple and rises of Huawei and Xiaomi, and could ultimately force other brands to use such third-party producers.
OEMs rise on smartphone manufacturing list
Today we’ll take a step back from the usual name-brand smartphone rankings to look at a new report that shows that Taiwan’s Foxconn (HKEx: 2038) is emerging as one of those “industry leaders you never heard of”, quietly supporting some of the fastest-growing names. That’s the big takeaway from the latest figures from data tracking firm IDC, which show that Foxconn officially passed global titan Samsung (Seoul: 005930) in last year’s final quarter to become the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer.
Most industry insiders already know Foxconn and its parent, Hon Hai, because of their longtime relationship as a key producer of iPhones for Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL). But the Taiwan company also counts Xiaomias a major client, as that company experiences a resurgence in its fortunes after a couple of years in the dark. Foxconn also makes phones for Huawei, which is also doing quite well on the global smartphone scene at the moment. Read Full Post…
