Avnet to distribute products for China's Huawei

BEIJING, CHINA: Electronic components distributing giant Avnet said on Tuesday it would sell Huawei Technologies products, helping the China's top telecoms equipment maker expand its reach.

Huawei has been one of China's biggest success stories on the global stage, rapidly moving beyond its home market to directly sell telecoms systems to a wide range of carriers in developing and developed markets through its own sales channels.

The new tie-up will initially see Avnet provide logistics, sales, marketing and other services for Huawei infrastructure products in its home China market, allowing Huawei to expand beyond its own channels, the companies said.

Avnet has assembled a team of 28 people for the new tie-up, after starting to distribute some Huawei products in Singapore and Malaysia last year, Chief Operating Officer Rick Hamada told Reuters in an interview.

The China tie-up could serve as a blueprint for Avnet to distribute Huawei products through all of Asia and eventually worldwide, he said.

"Huawei is a product specialist, and understands the markets very well," he said. "Avnet functions like a bridge, moving Huawei's products through various channels to get them to customers. We hope to help Huawei boost its sales in China and eventually throughout Asia."

Huawei traditionally competes with the likes of Ericsson and Alcatel Lucent, in selling entire systems to telecoms operators like Europe's Vodafone and Telenor.

It has been less active selling to corporate customers that are also big buyers of telecoms products collectively but buy far less on an individual basis than the larger telephone companies.

The new deal could put Huawei in more direct competition with names like Cisco, the world's largest maker of routers and switches, that count such enterprise clients among their major customers.

Huawei and Chinese rival ZTE have expanded rapidly in recent years to become two of China's most successful exporters of technology products, with overseas sales now accounting for half of their totals.

Huawei's net profit more than doubled last year to 18.3 billion yuan ($2.7 billion), fed by its ambitious export drive and strong 3G spending in its home China market.