Last week, China-based Huawei unveiled its latest effort to make nice with corporate America, announcing it will spend more than $6 billion on processors and other components from Broadcom (BRCM), Qualcomm (QCOM) and Avago Technologies (AVGO). The company has spent the last few years trying to reshape its image as a big, bad network provider that doesn't play by the rules into a transparent, law abiding and innovative technology player. But many government officials are still skeptical of the security of the Chinese company's products, and you can bet U.S. competitors like Cisco (CSCO) will do anything to keep Huawei from eating their lunch here (like they do abroad).
John Roese, general manager of Huawei's North American R&D division says investing in innovation is the key to changing the company's image. But he also says that whether America likes them or not, Huawei is here to stay. I recently caught up with Roese -- and toured Huawei's Silicon Valley R&D center -- to find out more about the company's push into the U.S. market.
Fortune: You've had legal issues with U.S. companies and have been criticized for selling to Iran and the Taliban. How are you trying to change this image?
Roese: There is a historical perspective and maybe even a biased and uninformed perspective of who Huawei is and what we do. We're now beginning to communicate our role around innovation. You can hear all of the noise, it's loud and very disruptive, but on the other side you start to hear a story about innovation. The information on the noise side might have been true in 1999 or 2004 but today if you really understand how the industry operates and what's going on in technology, many of those assumptions do not apply. If someone were to try and protect the US market from foreign technology none of us would have a cellular network. We wouldn't be able to build these infrastructures because these infrastructures come from global companies. Even the companies that are in the US are spread out across the globe -- their technologies are developed in other countries, their manufacturing is in the same factories that our manufacturing comes from. But we're very patient in the U.S. Even if you don't like us, at some point if the best technology and the best innovation is coming from Huawei, eventually it becomes a competitive disadvantage for your country to avoid it. We are just another global entity. We are just like any of the global entities that you know of. You just don't know us that well. My job is to try and help teach who we are and what we do.
