In the latest part its ongoing campaign to fight back against having to remove its communications solutions from European countries’ infrastructure, Huawei has released the findings of a report from business analysts Oxford Economics.
According to the report, Huawei contributed €16.4 billion to Europe’s GDP and supported 224,300 jobs in 2019. The Chinese telecoms giant holds the largest global market share (~35.3%) of any vendor. The second-largest, Nokia, holds less than half of Huawei’s market share at around 16.1 percent.
Huawei’s impact in Europe has grown markedly over the last five years. Its contribution to GDP increased by an average of 19.1% per year, in real terms, between 2015 and 2019.
The total employment and real tax contributions associated with Huawei’s activities in Europe grew by an average annual rate of 17.1% and 16.8% over the same period.
In 2019 alone, Huawei also supported €6.6bn in tax revenues – sufficient to pay for over 151,000 teachers’ salaries.
The study, penned by the UK think tank, highlights that pulling out Huawei’s equipment and replacing it with alternatives is going to be a costly and time-consuming endeavor—one that will likely delay 5G rollouts.
Hanging over the report is the decision in July 2020 by the UK government to commit to a timetable for the removal of Huawei equipment from the country’s growing 5G communications infrastructure by 2027 – effectively a huge U-turn to the decision it took only in January 2020 to restrict Huawei’s presence to just the radio access network element of 5G setups.
Pete Collings, Director of Economic Impact Consulting at Oxford Economics said: “This report is an objective way to show the full extent of Huawei’s economic impact in the UK. Companies like Huawei are major contributors to the UK directly but their impact is extended through the spending they undertake with other UK firms. This spending, and the further economic activity it generates, sustains jobs across the country, contributing to UK GDP and government tax revenues.”
