Huawei Acquires Symantec 49% Stake in Joint Venture

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and Symantec Corp. announced an agreement on a transaction where Huawei will acquire Symantec’s 49 percent stake in Huawei Symantec Technologies Co., Ltd. (Huawei Symantec) for USD $530 million.

Upon closing, the agreement will give Huawei full ownership of Huawei Symantec.

Huawei Symantec is a Hong Kong-based joint venture established by Huawei and Symantec in 2008. The company provides customers with innovative security, storage and systems management solutions. Over the past few months, Huawei and Symantec have held several rounds of discussions and negotiations over the future of the joint venture. Huawei and Symantec have mutually agreed that the next stage of growth for the joint venture would benefit from the direction of a single owner.

"I am thrilled that Huawei Symantec will become a key pillar of Huawei’s ICT solutions. The integration of Huawei Symantec’s innovative security and storage technology with Huawei’s enterprise products will reinforce Huawei’s leading position in cloud computing," said Guo Ping, Deputy Chairman of Huawei. "Huawei Symantec has achieved tremendous success in the past four years, having built a portfolio of products and solutions that are widely recognized by our customers and business partners. Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to increase investment in Huawei Symantec, reaffirming its commitment to customers."

"Symantec achieved the objectives we set four years ago and exit the joint venture with a good return on our investment, increased penetration into China and a growing appliance business," said Enrique Salem, president and chief executive officer, Symantec. "Today, China is one of Symantec’s fastest growing markets. It has grown 46 percent over the last three fiscal years. We remain committed to ongoing investment in China as well as building additional relationships in the region. Expertise gained from this endeavor has also led to our growing appliance business that provides our customers the additional choice of Symantec market leading security and storage software in an easy to deploy appliance."

The agreement is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012. Until the closing, Huawei and Symantec will continue to comply with their commitments under the existing joint venture agreements.

Comments

At SNW Europe, we already remarked that there was a booth with the logo Huawei, not anymore Huawei Symantec.

In February 2008, Symantec and Huawei commenced their joint venture, which was announced in May 2007. The new company was created to develop and distribute security and storage appliances to global telecommunications carriers and enterprises. Huawei licensed certain technology and Symantec certain storage and security software to the joint venture. Symantec was also contributing $150 million to the venture.

The two partners finally developed few products together. Huawei designed a de-dupe appliance resold by Symantec. The Chinese company in mainly in hardware and the U.S. one in software only.

Follow deeply Huawei, the most impressive storage firm in China, with an excellent portfolio of storage systems, not only in storage but also in radio and fixed access, site products, transport network, data communication and core network. Founded in 1987, with over 110,000 employees and around 46% in R&D, it's the largest China-based networking and telecommunications equipment supplier and the second-largest supplier of mobile telecommunications infrastructure equipment in the world after Ericsson. In 2010, Huawei recorded revenues of $28 billion.

Huawei is currently trying to expand in USA and Europe. Here it could be a good idea to find another brand name as Huawei is not easy to pronounce. According to Wikipedia, (Chinese: å?Žä¸º; pinyin: Huáwéi) officially transliterates in English to Huawei. The character å?Ž means splendid or magnificent, but can also mean China. The character ä¸º means action or achievement. The two characters combined (Huáwei) can be variously translated as achievement, magnificent act, or China is able.