Say what you want about the marginally effective U.S. campaign against Huawei, they do deserve some credit for keeping the issue of network security at the forefront of the wider discussion about next-generation mobile telecommunications.
They’re absolutely right to be worried about the murky relationship between the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, and Huawei. Even though there isn’t any proof that the Shenzhen-based company has inserted backdoors into its networking equipment or, as U.S. officials fear, share customer data with Chinese authorities, it’s undeniably a legitimate and reasonable concern.
But every time I hear U.S. stakeholders try to make this case to African countries and companies, I think back to Jaws — that scary 1970s movie about a giant shark — and that scene where Roy Scheider first encountered the shark. Stunned and terrified, Scheider stumbles backward and warns the captain: “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Focusing just on Huawei’s 5G equipment is like trying to catch Jaws with a fishing rod.
The fact is that Chinese technology dominates almost every level of Africa’s mobile internet stack: from the undersea fiber-optic trunks to the networking gear that powers the internet service providers to the majority of handsets used by customers on the continent and now, increasingly also the apps and services that run on that hardware layer.
The only telecom field where the Chinese aren’t competitive in Africa (yet) is in operating systems, which are all American-made, by companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. But that’s basically it. Chinese tech is pretty much indispensable everywhere else.
The next battle is going to be for services that leverage all of this new infrastructure and there too the Chinese are proving to be quite formidable. Africa, for example, is the only regional market in the world where Spotify and Apple Music get absolutely crushed. The Chinese-owned Boomplay streaming platform has 65 million customers across the continent, more than all of Apple Music’s paying subscribers worldwide.
Mobile payments, e-commerce, digital TV, and cryptocurrency are among a growing number of verticals in Africa where Chinese tech companies are going to be very competitive.
What many U.S. officials don’t seem to appreciate is that even if they could harpoon Huawei, it probably wouldn’t make that much of a difference in Africa, given the depth and breadth of so much other Chinese technology integration on the continent.
They’re going to need a bigger plan.
