Dan's China diary - day 18

In May 2006, silicon.com senior reporter Dan Ilett travelled to China, seeking to get behind some of today's most interesting tech and business stories. This is his warts-and-all diary, which appears daily this month. For in-depth coverage of this fact-finding trip inside China, including analysis and exclusive stories, click here.

Tuesday 23 May, Shenzhen

Huawei's driver picks me up today in a black Mercedes limousine and we make our way over to the company's HQ.

It's massive - 26,000 people work on the company premises here, which have high-rise towers built all over the company's 1.6km2 of land. The privately owned company achieved $8.2bn-worth of sales last year, I hear.

Kaiser, my tech journo friend back in Beijing, told me this would be an impressive visit. He was right.

A large building struts out above the landscape dwarfing everything else - apparently the more dramatic staff at Huawei call it the 'Tower of 10,000 Engineers' - the R&D facility.

Huawei generally tries to keep a low profile in the media so I've been lucky to get this interview. To kick the day off I meet with the exec board - they're all very switched on guys in their mid-thirties who know the networks and mobility business inside out. Huawei is one of the few companies I've seen in China that really appears to understand the international market and how to use branding. It's won some impressive contracts over the last year or so - notably beating Marconi as one of a dozen or so vendors to BT's 21CN next-generation network project. (Apparently BT audited Huawei in 16 different areas before awarding the contract.)

But it's also focusing on China's market for the future. They stand a much better chance of landing deals here than any foreign competitors, I'd say. They have more people on the ground, for starters, but they also have a huge head-start in the Chinese business world.

In terms of 3G technology, for example, they can use the rest of the world as a testing environment before setting to work on China, when it pushes forward.

I get shown around the demonstration centre. Apparently all the management are taught how to explain all of Huawei's business and products here. The training halls at Huawei are massive, packing a few hundred people in for each lecture, so lord alone knows how many courses they run.

Interestingly the execs don't see the company as a direct competitor to Cisco. They say they sell a much broader range of equipment, from high-end routers all the way down to mobile phones. But some of the routing equipment looks similar to other kit I worked on in my past life as a network engineer.

The staff quarters are something else. Many of the staff live on the Huawei campus. The flats are luxurious, by anyone's standards. There are bars, shops and a huge swimming pool with a notice that tells staff not to swim during work hours. Although it's impressive I get a feeling that living and breathing the company all day long would be too much for someone like me. Other tech companies in Silicon Valley are all in favour of this type of approach, which is probably why they are so successful. Maybe it's just my cynical nature but I'd feel trapped.

Dai and Sharon, my two PR chaperones for the day, escort me to lunch. Sharon is second-generation Chinese - she grew up in the US and we talk about adjusting to the culture in China and in Huawei. I've met so many returnee Chinese people on this trip - when you think about it the Chinese government must have had at least a 20-year plan to get people bringing back foreign knowledge into the country.

This time last year Huawei didn't really have a unified PR department, Sharon tells me. Now they have 30 people and she's helping to lead the team. They've just signed a deal with UK PR agency Fleishman Hillard to promote them - it clearly shows that the company understands it must get that kind of comms right too.

I'm then treated to a quick tour around the nerve centre of networks that Huawei runs - it's a high security environment with CCTV cameras everywhere. There's a Nasa-like control room manned by 55 people wearing headsets. That room is overlooked by a James Bond-style meeting room where apparently the bigwigs meet when there's real trouble.

"Has it ever been used for that?" I ask.

"Of course not," my guide giggles.

I'm completely bowled over by the size and scope of this place. And apparently Huawei is building another huge complex in Nanjing. Certainly an interesting company to keep an eye on.

After looking around some warehouses, it's time to head off and take the bus over to Hong Kong.

Come back to Dan's diary tomorrow as he moves on to Hong Kong and finds out about relative property prices and controls placed on the media.