Huawei may call it a “stand”, but the hanger that looms over part of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona leaves little doubt about the scale of the Chinese telecoms group’s ambitions.
Entry is not easy. A stern reminder of no photography is a final warning that here lies Huawei’s latest technologies and services that it doesn’t want its competitors to see, a far cry from just a few years ago when it was seen as the imitator desperate to copy the more established European and US groups such as Motorola and Ericsson.
To describe the company as just a telecoms equipment maker underplays a business that offers to build an entire ecosystem around an operator, ranging from broadcast masts and data centres to managed services and software; as well as handsets using its own chip set pitched against the highest-specification Android phones made by the likes of Samsung.