ALU must differentiate itself from Huawei

Huawei may have a reputation for being just a price leader, but that’s enough to propel significant growth outside China and pull it into the DSL port shipment lead over Alcatel-Lucent. We believe that Huawei is not so much a competitor as a fall-back when there is no real “competition”, meaning where vendors fail to generate any meaningful differentiation. Price then decides, and Huawei wins.

The success recently may be due in small part to economic conditions, but we believe the largest part is due to equipment vendors ceding key strategic issues in service creation and management to partners. That being done, the equipment is just plumbing and the partner solutions can be applied over Huawei. We believe ALU sees this, and that it was a motivation behind its purchase of subscriber management specialist firm Motive.