CHINESE technology giant Huawei has set itself the ambitious goal of becoming one of the top two telco equipment-makers by revenue in Australia.
And it is confident it can hit that target even without scoring one of the lucrative NBN supply contracts.
"We have the best technology in the world at the best prices and we are determined to win," said John Lord, the first independent chairman of one of Huawei's regional operations and a former chief executive of the Maritime Board of Victoria.
"We have set a target of being in the top two within five years in Australia.
"We are serious about Australia, we are serious about growing here and we are here to stay."
Mr Lord was appointed to the Huawei Australia board 10 months ago to help the company make inroads in Canberra, where it is desperately seeking a slice of the multi-billion-dollar NBN equipment contracts on offer.
Huawei hopes to be appointed as the NBN Co's second supplier of fibre-optic equipment, alongside Alcatel-Lucent, which bagged a $1.4 billion deal two years ago.
So far Huawei has been unsuccessful, and is now the only big supplier of telecommunications equipment not to have won NBN Co work.
The network builder handed Ericsson a $1.1bn contract for fixed-wireless kit and Nokia Siemens Networks a $400 million deal for network transmission services.
But Mr Lord said the NBN was not the "be all and end all" in Huawei's local goals, and the company would not withdraw from our shores even if it entirely missed out on a supply contract.
"At the end of the day, NBN Co is putting all the cables in, but it's what hangs off the cables that counts," he said. "There are some big contracts out there on the wireless side and the cable, but outside of that is where the growth will be in the next five or 15 years when the NBN is in.
"That to me gives us a great opportunity to grow."
Missing out on an NBN contract would delay Huawei's ambition to grow its Australian business into a top-two equipment supply player.
"The only thing that changes is our timeline. But the mobile device market is huge and we can play a big role there," Mr Lord said.
To some extent, Huawei's ambitions have been hampered by persistent whispers that the company has close ties to the Chinese government, something it repeatedly denies.
It's a perception Huawei's local board is trying to dispel, going so far as to appoint Liberal and Labor party heavyweights - the former foreign minister Alexander Downer and former Victorian premier John Brumby - to its board to help ease the apprehension in Canberra.
"Whenever you've got new players, new entrants - whether it's Japan three decades ago or China now - you are always going to get vested interests who, as Machiavelli said, want to preserve the status quo," said Mr Brumby, who spent three days in the company's Shenzhen headquarters conducting due diligence before agreeing to join Huawei's Australian board.
"There's a lot of commercial tension towards Huawei because there's a shift of economic activity to China and the growth of Chinese companies is challenging a lot of the existing order."
Globally, the company, China's largest privately owned enterprise, is the No 2 telecom kit supplier behind Sweden's Ericsson. It turns over $US32bn ($29.6bn) a year and supplies equipment to 45 of the world's 50 biggest telcos.
Despite winning big equipment contracts with local operators such as Optus and Vodafone, the company sits fifth in the list of Australia's leading telecom equipment suppliers.
In 2010, it reported local revenue of $171m, the only figures publicly available.
Mr Lord insists there are other opportunities for Huawei to make its mark and show its commitment to Australia. One such opportunity, although still in its embryonic stages, is the board's plan to establish a local Huawei research and development centre in Melbourne.
Although Huawei's local board has already forged training and equipment partnerships with three leading universities in Australia - University of Melbourne, Macquarie University and RMIT - it sees the establishment of a formal R&D centre as a logical step to increase its presence and contribution to the local market.
Huawei boasts one of the world's largest R&D workforces, with almost half of its 140,000 staff engaged in research roles, but Mr Brumby believes local talent can greatly enhance the company's efforts and even act as a framework for how the nation develops its ties with the booming Asian market.
"Is our whole future just about the mining sector and high terms of trade that trickle down to the east coast, or is it about a transformation of the Australian economy?" Mr Brumby said.
"The right story for Australia is the transformation and that means pushing ahead in the technological revolution.
"We will see Huawei grow in Australia - it will grow investment, it will grow jobs - and it's the sort of company that Australia is going to need to take that big step going forward."
Source:cn-c114