Choichi Tosaka, chief executive of the Japanese materials and electronics company Taiyo Yuden, has predicted in an interview with the website Gizchina.com that Huawei may sell 100 million 5G smartphones in China in 2020.
The forecast comes after Huawei Rotating Chairman Guo Ping urged companies last month to build partnerships with the Chinese telecom giant to develop 5G technology applications, insisting that its participants will be “the biggest winners”.
“This is a huge market worth trillions of US dollars. The biggest winners will be our partners”, Guo was quoted by CNBC as saying.
He made the comments during a Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, where Huawei’s top executive discussed the spread of new superfast fifth generation commercial networks that would enable the transmission of large amounts of data.
Guo said that the rollout was going “more rapidly than expected” and that “we predict by the end of this year we will see 60 commercial 5G networks”.
US Crusade Against Huawei
Huawei is currently a leading provider of 5G equipment and has reportedly clinched more than 50 commercial 5G contracts around the world despite being barred from some major industrial markets such as Japan and Australia, following a US crackdown on the Chinese tech titan.
Huawei is still on the US Department of Commerce’s blacklist after it restricted the company’s access to the purchase of American hardware and called on its allies to exclude Huawei from their plans to establish 5G networks.
Even so, the Chinese tech giant has already provided its source codes to the UK, Canada, and Germany, which plan to use Huawei components in their high-speed 5G internet networks amid warnings from the US that they could damage the security of military communications.
In September, company founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei announced that Huawei had begun manufacturing 5G base stations – the towers facilitating wireless communication between mobile devices and internet networks - without the use of parts made in the US.
Washington has repeatedly accused Huawei of collaborating with the Chinese government by conducting spy activities in the US, charges that both the company and Beijing vehemently reject.