Huawei Threatening Cisco
By Gale Morrison -- Electronic News, 8/23/2002
Networking IC company executives and industry analysts have been fascinated this summer with the increasingly bitter rivalry between Huawei (pronounced WAH-way) of China and one-time American business darling Cisco Systems.
Huawei is China’s largest telecom and datacom equipment supplier, and has recently started shipping overseas, analysts say, certain routers that are tough to distinguish from Cisco’s in quality and performance--at one-tenth the price.
Working in Huawei’s favor are the legion of battered communications IC companies who have spent the last four years intensively developing network processors and optical speed-capable transceivers, framers and content addressable memories for Cisco to buy, only to see that company’s buying slow to a crawl, just as buying by its North American competitors, Lucent and Nortel Networks, has.
The embrace of China's largest networking OEM and the effect the new systems will have on the world market for routers and other Internet Protocol-based communications contracts is very significant, analysts say.
“The real issue is Huawei poses a very real threat to Cisco,” said one top analyst who, like many other analysts and executives, requested anonymity, “due to the sensitive nature of this topic.”
For the full story, see Monday's print and Web editions of Electronic News.
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