After reading through the SCENARIO below, answer the following questions.

1. What is S-W-O-T analysis and how can it be useful for organisations?
2. Conduct a S-W-O-T analysis of HuaWAII based on the information in the case study. Structure your S-W-O-T according to the three business functions: Human Resources Management, Accounting and Finance, and Marketing. Present your analysis in the form of a S-W-O-T table.
3. Based on your S-W-O-T analysis, which are the most important issues that you think Huawei needs to address? Explain the reasons for your answer.
4. How do you think Huawei should respond to the most important issues arising from the S-W-O-T analysis? Explain your recommendations.

SCENERIO :

HuWAII was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei.

Ren was raised in a very poor environment. To escape a life of poverty and drudgery, Ren did what many young Chinese men of that era did, he joined the army. He left the military in 1983 when China began to reduce its armed forces and went into the electronics business.

By his own admission, he wasn't a great businessman at first. But he was quick to learn and was a keen student of Western business practices and European history.

Huawei started by selling simple telecoms equipment to the rural Chinese market. Within a few years, Huawei was developing and producing the equipment itself.

By 1995, the company was generating sales of around US$220m, mainly from selling to the rural market. The following year Huawei was given the status of a Chinese 'national champion'. In practice, this meant the government closed the market to foreign competition.

At a time when China's economy was growing by an average of 10% per year, this was big advantage. But it was only when Huawei started to expand overseas in 2000, that it really saw its sales soar.

In 2002, Huawei made US$552m from its international market sales. By 2005 its international market contracts exceeded its domestic business for the first time.

Ren's early days in business instilled in him a desire to protect his company from the ups and downs of the stock market. Huawei is privately held and employee-owned. This gave Ren the power to invest more money back into research and development. Each year, Huawei spends US$20bn on R&D - one of the biggest such budgets in the world.

'Publicly listed companies have to pay a lot of attention to their balance sheets,' he says. 'They can't invest too much, otherwise profits will drop and so will their share prices. At Huawei, we fight for our ideals. We know that if we look after our investments and staff so that our business will grow. That's how we've managed to pull ahead and succeed.'

Today, Huawei is the world's biggest seller of network telecommunications equipment. From aspiring to be a company like Apple, it now sells more smartphones than Apple.

But problems have continued to loom over Huawei's international success.

Ren and Huawei's links to the Chinese Communist Party have raised suspicions that the company owes its dramatic rise to its powerful political connections in China. The US has accused Huawei of being a tool of the Chinese government.

It's an accusation which Ren denies.

It was 1 December 2018. US President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping were dining at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires.

They had a lot to discuss. The US and China were in the middle of a trade war - imposing tariffs on each other's goods - and growth forecasts for both countries had recently been cut as a result. This was adding to the fear of a slowing global economy.

In the event, the two leaders agreed a truce in the trade war, with Donald Trump tweeting that 'Relations with China have taken a BIG leap forward!'

But thousands of kilometres north in Canada, an arrest was taking place that would throw doubt on these good relations.

Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's chief financial officer and Ren Zhengfei's eldest daughter, had been detained by Canadian officials while transferring between flights at Vancouver airport.

The arrest had come at the request of the US, who accused her of breaking sanctions against Iran. Nearly two months later, the US Department of Justice filed two indictments against Huawei and Ms Meng.

Under the first indictment, Huawei and Ms Meng were charged with misleading banks and the US government about their business in Iran.

The second indictment - against Huawei - involved criminal charges including obstruction of justice and the attempted theft of trade secrets.

Both Huawei and Ms Meng deny the charges.

The charge of stealing trade secrets centres on a robotic tool - developed by T-Mobile - known as Tappy.

According to legal documents, Huawei had tried to buy Tappy, a device which mimicked human fingers by tapping mobile phone screens rapidly to test responsiveness.

T-Mobile was in partnership with Huawei at the time, but it rejected the Chinese firm's offers, fearing it would use the technology to make phones for T-Mobile's competitors.

It's alleged that one of Huawei's US employees then smuggled Tappy's robotic arm into his satchel so that he could send its details to colleagues in China.

After the alleged theft was discovered, the Huawei employee claimed that the arm had mistakenly fallen into his bag.

Huawei claimed that the employee had been acting alone, and the case was settled out of court in 2014. But the latest case is built on email trails between managers in China and the company's US employees, linking Huawei management to the alleged theft.

The indictment also details evidence of a bonus scheme from 2013, offering Huawei employees financial rewards for stealing confidential information from competitors.

Huawei has denied any such scheme exists.

Over the years companies like Cisco, Nortel and Motorola have all pointed the finger at the Chinese firm.

But US fears about Huawei are about much more than industrial espionage. For more than a decade, the US government has seen the company as little more than an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.

These concerns have been brought to the fore with the advent of 'fifth generation' or 5G mobile internet, which promises download speeds 10 or 20 times faster than at present, and much greater connectivity between devices.

As the world's biggest telecoms infrastructure provider, Huawei is one of the companies best placed to build new 5G networks. But the US has warned its intelligence partners that awarding contracts to Huawei would be tantamount to allowing the Chinese spy on them.

The UK, Germany and Canada are reviewing whether Huawei's products pose a security threat. Australia went a step further last year, and banned equipment suppliers 'likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government'. Australian authorities pinpointed to an article in Chinese law that makes it impossible for any company to refuse to help the Chinese Communist Party in intelligence gathering.

For his part, Ren says that Huawei's resources have never and would never be used to spy for the Chinese government.

In China, most chief executives are Communist Party members. Being a member of the party is very much a networking opportunity - in the way one would join a business association. The worry is that these close links mean that if the Communist Party asked a company to do something, they would have no choice but to comply. And if that company is one that is involved in sensitive global telecoms infrastructure projects, it's easy to see why Western observers would be worried.

There is no evidence to indicate that Huawei is in any way under the orders of the Chinese government, or that Beijing has any plans to dictate business plans and strategy at Huawei - particularly when it comes to spying.

But the way in which the Chinese Communist Party has robustly defended Huawei has raised questions about how independent the company is of its influence.

'It is the Chinese government's duty to protect its people,' Ren says. 'If the US attempts to gain competitive edge by undermining China's most outstanding hi-tech talent, then it is understandable if the Chinese government, in turn, protects its hi-tech companies.'

Chinese attitudes to data collection and data privacy are different to those in the West - many people don't care if businesses have access to their data, arguing that it adds to the convenience of life and work.

How this develops will determine how Chinese companies are viewed by foreign governments when they do business overseas. Companies like Huawei have grown up in a system where to survive and thrive they needed strong links to the Chinese government - there was and is no other choice. But these links could harm their reputation abroad.

At its most sophisticated, everything in entire cities would be connected - driverless cars, the temperature of buildings, the speed of public transport, how well you brush your teeth, to a smart cup that reminds you when you should drink some water - the list is endless.

Huawei is thought to be a year ahead of its competitors in terms of its technological expertise and what it can offer customers, according to industry sources.

It's also thought that the company can offer prices that are about 10% cheaper than its competitors, although critics claim this is because of state support.

Ren dismisses this, saying that Huawei doesn't receive government subsidies.

He says the real reason behind the US resistance to Huawei is its superior technology.

'There's no way the US can crush us,' he says. 'The world needs Huawei because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily we could just scale things down a bit.'

Many analysts say that Huawei's exclusion from US networks could actually cause the US to fall behind in its 5G capabilities.

What this would mean in reality is a world of two internets - or what analysts are calling a 'digital iron curtain' - dividing the world into parts that do business with Chinese companies like Huawei, and those that don't.

Because of US pressure on its allies, Huawei has been on an aggressive public relations campaign to win over customers and government stakeholders.

In recent days, Vodafone's boss Nick Read called on the US to share any evidence it has about Huawei, while Andrus Ansip, the European Commission's vice president for the digital single market, said in a tweet that he had met with Huawei's rotating CEO to discuss the importance of being open and transparent, as they explored ways of working together.

But suspicions about Huawei remain.

Ren is optimistic about such concerns.

'For countries who believe in them [suspicions about Huawei] we will hold off,' he says. 'For countries who feel Huawei is trustworthy, we may move a little faster. The world is so big. We can't walk across every corner of it.'

There's no denying China has made remarkable strides in the past 40 years. The economy grew by an annual average of 10% for three decades, helping to lift 800 million people out of poverty. It is now the second-largest economy in the world, only surpassed by the US.

Some estimates put China's economy ahead of America's by 2030. But its success has raised concerns that it is only possible with a huge amount of government control over the country's companies. The fear is that control could be used to achieve the Communist Party's goals - which are at this point unclear.

But Ren dismisses this, insisting that China is more open than ever before.

'China has more or less tried to close itself off from the outside world for 5,000 years,' he says. 'Yet we had found ourselves poor, lagging behind other nations. It was only in the past 30 years since Deng Xiaoping opened China's doors to the world that China has become more prosperous. Therefore, China must continue to move forward on the path of reform and opening-up.'

For Huawei, and Ren, these are highly uncertain times with no way of telling what lies ahead.