Sales growth highlights rise of China's Huawei

Huawei Technologies, the fast-growing Chinese vendor of communications network gear, reached global contract sales of over US$30 billion last year, the company said Tuesday, marking a rise of nearly 30 percent from the year before.

The company expects contract sales this year to rise further to $36 billion, a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail. The spokeswoman declined to give details, but the figures highlight continued growth for Huawei, which surpassed Nokia Siemens Networks to become the world's number-two vendor of mobile infrastructure in the third quarter last year, according to researcher Dell'Oro Group. Sweden's Ericsson held on to the top spot.

Huawei has spread especially quickly across the developing world and it has benefited from large spending by China's state-owned mobile carriers as they expand their 3G networks. But Huawei has also worked to crack the U.S. and Western European markets. The upgrade to 4G networks has been seen as an opportunity for Huawei to achieve wider success in such developed markets. Both Huawei and Ericsson provided gear to Swedish carrier TeliaSonera for its launch last month of what it called the world's first commercial mobile services using LTE (Long-Term Evolution) equipment.

Huawei, a privately owned company, formally reveals its financial results once each year and has not yet done so for 2009.