India has put a ban on Chinese telecom equipment manufacturers Huawei and ZTE due to security concerns.There have been reports of Internet espionage of sensitive government of India’s computers as well as some of the company’s headquarters being off limits to Indian employees.This had made the government wary putting a ban on the Chinese companies involved in communications.In a desperate attempt to placate India’s concerns Huawie’s Chinese employees are keeping Indian names.This is totally hilarious and I don’t think will cut much ice with the authorities.Small scale Chinese handset makers which also are facing a ban in India are trying to open factories in India to circumvent these restrictions.
Chetan Chen is into technology, Deepak Xu handles marketing, and Deepika Fang is a network systems pro. And when their company needs to reach out to the public, Rajeev Yao gets into the picture.
Welcome to the charm offensive of Huawei India, a firm that is on the radars of the Indian security establishment by virtue of its place of incorporation, the People’s Republic of China. As its top brass prepares to walk extraordinary miles to get its operations going on in one of the world’s biggest telecom markets, the Chinese equipment maker is nudging its Mandarin staff to mind their names.
Ergo, this cultural revolution with a telecom twist has Chen Tian Siang, a top consultant with Huawei India, introducing himself as Chetan Chen; Ling Yong Xu, a top management executive in its customer care division, is Deepak to his Indian colleagues; Liu Fang, a senior executive with its networks division, goes by the name ‘Deepika Fang’; Li Gin, a coordinator with Huawei India, is called ‘Rosy’; and Zhao Bing, in charge of the company’s warehouse division, is just Amit. To top it all, Huawei’s spokesperson in India, Weimin Yao, is known as ‘Rajeev’ to media colleagues here.
Huawei executives carry their Indian names even on their visiting cards. Suraj, Amit, Arvind, Ravi, Rajesh and Rajeev were some of the popular names adopted by their Chinese executives in India, says a Huawei staff.
The company reasons that since Indians find it difficult to pronounce Chinese names, the Indian nomenclature helps in daily operations. This also makes Chinese executives more culturally acceptable not just to their Indian colleagues, but also to their clients and business associates in the country.
The government late last year took steps to stop a flood of Made-in-China phones entering the country. The phones are made by the so-called shanzhai, or bandit, manufacturers. These companies specialize in producing inexpensive, no-name phones; Indian partners often import them and slap on a local brand name. Over the past few years, Indian sales of these gray-market Chinese-made phones have soared; they accounted for 30% of the Indian market in 2009, says Flora Wu, an analyst in Beijing with consulting firm BDA China. That’s 40 million handsets, up from almost zero in 2007. Problem is, many of these shanzhai companies don’t put International Mobile Equipment Identity numbers on their phones. Given the way the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in 2008 used cell phones to communicate, having tens of millions of anonymous cell phones in the country creates a major security threat. So last year the Indian government began forcing operators to disconnect phones without IMEIs. That change – as well as the latest moves against Huawei and ZTE – may be leading some Chinese companies to rethink India. Instead of exporting from China, why not produce locally? Like the Japanese automakers that started manufacturing in the U.S. in the 1990s, thereby disarming some of their strongest nationalist critics, the Chinese might be able to win friends in India by investing in the country, creating local jobs and helping to build a local supply chain of manufacturers. One sign of possible things to come: According to the Indian newspaper the Business Standard, China Wireless Technology, a handset maker in Shenzhen, wants to open a factory in India and boost the number of Indian employees from current 200-300 to 1,000.
