Came across an interesting feature on Huawei in Time magazine April 15 2013:
"INSIDE THE CHINESE COMPANY AMERICA CAN'T TRUST"
Huawei is a global telecom giant with eyes on the U.S. market. Is it also a hidden channel for China's spies and saboteurs?
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2140210,00.html#ixzz2fQzSEPsv (only available to subscribers online)
Some would say the Nix are now effectively sponsored by the People's Liberation Army.
Principally a manufacturer of telecommunications hardware, Huawei are a shady outfit, banned from tendering for contracts in Australia and the USA. This is due to concerns that as a company with close ties to the Chinese government, military and intelligence, it could use its telco products for spying and sabotage.
These are actually reasonable fears considering that the Chinese government and its intelligence agencies have been involved in cyberattacks on the US government and businesses. And that more than 100 individuals or corporations were charged with industrial spying in the US on behalf of Chinese interests last year.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-10/chinese-telco-huawei-tries-to-shake-off-spy-image/4744886
They'll be seeing the Phoenix sponsorship as a way of trying to gain acceptance in the Australian market for it's principal business of telco network equipment after it was barred from tendering for the national broadband network there (sales of its smart phones are allowed everywhere as they are not seen as a security threat).
Huawei are one of the world's biggest corporations, the second-biggest supplier of telecommunications infrastructure after Sweden's Ericsson and the third largest smartphone company, with $ US 34.5 billion in sales last year (more than McDonalds).
Of course, the truth often lies in-between - in my opinion, although there are grounds to be suspicious of communist China's methods and intentions in some areas of business (it's a corrupt country with a bad government that infringes on human rights and is full of bad business practices and amoral attitudes of "the ends justifying the means"), often they are just trying to do business, the same as anyone else.
The Time magazine article is quite balanced and includes dissenting Western opinion on Huawei such as that of Eric Anderson of the National Intelligence University, Washington (author of "Sinophobia - the Huawei Story") who has found no evidence Huawei has ever been involved in espionage. Eric Harwit, University of Hawaii (author of "China's Telecommunications Revolution") believes US lawmakers are basically shutting Huawei out to protect US telecommunications equipment manufacturers.
However its founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei is ex-People's Liberation Army and thought even by some Chinese experts to retain ties with the military. Cheng Li, Brookings Institute: "The telecom industry is part of the national defence industry in China." Huawei's rapid growth has been linked to its ties with the Chinese government and hence huge resources made available to backing it.
Huawei remains mysterious as one of those peculiar Chinese communist business entities, never listed on any stock exchange and never publishing any financial records, never accountable to anyone except its own management and the Chinese government...Eric Harwit believes ties to the PLA are not significant, but admits that, like any Chinese company, they will in the end do whatever their government tells them to...
Recently a British parliamentary committee found cause for concern and began investigating the security implications of British Telecom's use of Huawei equipment....Canada are following suit...