Huawei, Chinese Telecom Company, Finds Warmer Welcome in Europe

Declaring that Britain was “open for business,” Mr. Cameron announced that his guest, Ren Zhengfei, the chief executive of Huawei, had agreed to expand the company’s already sizable operations in Britain with an investment of £1.2 billion, or $2 billion.

Given the typically close cooperation between the United States and Britain on security issues, the trans-Atlantic divide over Huawei and another Chinese equipment provider, ZTE, is striking. On Monday, the Intelligence Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives branded the companies security threats and raised the possibility that their gear could be used to spy on American interests if used in U.S. telecommunications networks.

Huawei has rejected the allegations as “little more than an exercise in China bashing and misguided protectionism.”

By contrast, said Roland Sladek, a spokesman for Huawei, “Europe is almost like a second home market for us.”

And for good reason. Huawei means jobs and investment for Britain and, more broadly, for Europe. The company already has 800 employees in Britain and a research center in Ipswich. The investment announced by Mr. Ren is expected to create 700 jobs in five years and additional technical centers in the country. In all, the company has about 7,300 employees in Europe.

Mr. Cameron’s government said it had no plans to change its relationship with the Chinese company in the wake of the U.S. committee’s recommendations. But in a trust-but-verify approach to the partnership, Huawei set up a Cyber Security Evaluation Center two years ago in Banbury, England. There, its engineers work alongside officials of Government Communications Headquarters, a British spy agency, to vet Huawei equipment for use in Britain.

“We recognize, of course, that no systems can be completely invulnerable, but by working together we can mitigate some of the risks,” said a spokesman for the Cabinet Office in London, who asked not to be identified as a matter of government policy.

Huawei counts as its customers many of the biggest telecommunications companies in Europe, including BT and Vodafone of Britain, Telefónica of Spain and Everything Everywhere, a partnership between France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom in Britain. The company’s equipment is in high demand, analysts say, as those companies scramble to roll out next-generation wireless broadband networks.

ZTE’s European telecommunications clients include KPN of the Netherlands. In Sweden ZTE is working with Hutchison Whampoa of Hong Kong on a high-speed wireless network.

As the world’s second-largest supplier of telecommunications network equipment, after Ericsson of Sweden, Huawei generated only 4 percent of its $32.4 billion in revenue in 2011 in the United States. In Europe, Huawei has gotten a friendlier welcome. Europe accounted for nearly 12 percent of its revenue last year, and sales in the region rose 26 percent last year, more than twice the company’s worldwide growth rate.

BT, which uses Huawei gear in the metal-clad sidewalk boxes where local telephone lines are fed into the company’s network, considers Huawei a “trusted equipment supplier,” the company said.

“We find them to be good value and high quality — that’s why they have been chosen as a supplier in a fiercely competitive international market,” BT added.

The company declined to comment on whether it had received any requests from U.S. officials to stop doing business with Huawei. The Cabinet Office spokesman said he was unaware of any such pressure.

“We don’t see this as an issue that affects our relationship,” he said.