The Tasmu platform announced by the Ministry of Transport and Communications is an incredible programme with great opportunities for Huawei to participate and move forward in Qatar, a top global official of Huawei told Gulf Times.
“Qatar is an important market for us. We are excited about potential opportunities with the government of Qatar as well as with the Tasmu platform, rollout of the 5G networks and the development of smart cities which is upcoming; we hope our contributions are going to be very significant in Qatar,” said Andy Purdy, chief security officer, Huawei USA.
“Huawei is providing in-building solutions for the wireless cellular coverage within many of the 2022 FIFA World Cup stadiums. Many other collaborations efforts for the World Cup and other areas are under discussion,” explained Purdy.
The official said that the importance of privacy and transparency is growing day by day and there are ways to assure cyber security through objective practices.
“Resilience is a factor and the operators should develop platforms so that if any bad guy encroaches, they should be able to limit the harm. Security is a journey and not a destination. As the bad guys can hack in real time, creating trust is a shared responsibility to take advantage of the great technologies,” added the Huawei security officer.
Purdy said that Huawei’s overall approach in the last seven to eight years has been to create a global assurance programme for cyber security and privacy to create an objective basis trust for customers, suppliers, and governments.
“We work with a global committee and we have an internal process to set requirements, track conformance and test our systems. We buy numerous tools from around the world to double-check our products for vulnerabilities, fix problems and build new technologies to provide greater assurance,” noted the official.
“In 5G, we have a third party solution to monitor security mechanism and gateways as well as tools to make sure that risk are managed,” he added.
As for the US sanctions against Huawei, Purdy said that the concern of the US government is China, not Huawei. “Cyber security experts say that it is important to have an objective and transparent basis for trust. We have been promoting global uniform standards and best practices and independent testing for trust verification process. This proves that we are not under the influence of any government,” he pointed out.
“Some of the governments, such as the UK and Germany have said that the US has not given any credible evidence about any significant cyber security wrongdoing by Huawei anywhere in the world,” he said.
“Huawei is becoming more optimistic about our ability to do business without the American suppliers. We prefer to buy from American suppliers as we buy from various organisations around the world. We spend an average of $11bn yearly on the US suppliers which translates to around 40,000 jobs a year in the US. Shortly after the sanctions were imposed, we estimated that the impact of the sanctions in the projected growth of revenue would be around $30bn. Despite the challenges, we have 24% global market share with 8% profit on a year on year growth in the third quarter of 2019. So we now estimate there may be $10bn reduction in growth or maybe less than that,” said Purdy
The official also highlighted that Huawei provides great energy efficiency for their products resulting in reducing the carbon footprints.
“It is possible that Huawei may go without Google and we are working on the alternatives. In 5G there are now no US components. It might take sometime to find an equally trusted medium such as Google and the Android platform. But we hope that we don’t have to do so as things might be settled amicably,” Purdy added.
