Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (hereafter Huawei) is a leading global telecommunications solutions provider. Founded in 1987 by Mr. Ren Zhengfei, Huawei has transformed from a one-room workshop in Shenzhen, China to the world's largest information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services provider with capabilities across carrier networks, enterprise, and consumer fields. With a vision "To enrich life through communication," Huawei has earned a reputation as one of the most dynamic, fastest growing, innovative multinational technology companies. At the beginning, Huawei picked up basic technology by reverse engineering foreign products and used that as the foundation to develop more complex technologies. As the Chinese government started to notice Huawei's achievements, government support began to play a much larger role in the growth of Huawei. Huawei gained lots of publicity through high profile visits of government officials and won large contracts on domestic telecommunication infrastructure development like the national railway system, in which their technologies were used to develop communication solutions. Huawei's technology enabled them to provide top notch telecommunication switches and mobile communication solutions for the railway system. Financial resources, such as loans, were also made more available. Later, Huawei put strong emphasis on in-house research & development (R&D). With strong in-house R&D and aggressive undercutting of prices, Huawei has expanded quickly over the years and its products and solutions have been deployed in over 140 countries, serving more than one third of the world's population. In 2014, Huawei recorded profits of 5.5 billion USD (Huawei Financial Results, 2014). It serves around 80 percent of the world's largest telecoms operators with BT, Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile among its notable partners. Huawei is the only Chinese company that received higher revenue from markets outside China (67%) than from the domestic market. In 2015, Huawei has around 170,000 staff globally (De Cremer & Tao, 2015), with 22 regional offices and over 100 subsidiaries around the world. Today, the three main categories that Huawei offers are operators (carrier networks), enterprises and consumers' products/services. Its first segment - carrier network segment includes a wide range of wireless networks, fixed networks, telecom software and core networks, as well as services solutions to telecommunications operators. The second segment, enterprise business segment, is engaged in developing and manufacturing ICT products and solutions including enterprise network infrastructure, cloud-based data centers, enterprise information security, and unified communication and collaboration solutions for government entities, public utilities, energy, power, transportation, finance and other industries.Lastly, the consumer business segment develops and manufactures mobile broadband devices, home devices, tablets, and smartphones, as well as the applications for these devices (Marketline, 2013). Since 2012, Huawei started to invest heavily in the consumer market, rolling out mobile devices to compete with the dominant players like Apple and Samsung. As of 2015, Huawei's mobile phone market has seen rapid growth, and worldwide exposure has since been achieved. Despite its growth, Huawei is facing a number of issues. Firstly, Huawei is still frequently perceived as low-quality Chinese products, due to its country-of-origin and aggressive pricing strategies. Secondly, Huawei's aggressive low-price approach has directly resulted in eroding profit margins in some markets. Thirdly, Huawei's technology development has also been controversial and the company is constantly being accused over the theft of intellectual properties. Lastly, because of historical links to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Chinese government, Huawei has not been able to successfully convince certain segments of the western countries that as a trustworthy multinational technological firm, Huawei is purely interested in business growth and market share. In 2014, Huawei's smartphone business group was the fastest growing of its three main business groups, with sales expanding 32% for that year. Huawei remains the largest and most prestigious local smartphone brand within China. However, outside its native country, the Huawei brand faces the challenge of building brand awareness among individual consumers. One reason is that Huawei was a network infrastructure and business-to-business telecommunication solution supplier rather than consumer-focused mobile device supplier in the past. There has been some recent progress, as its awareness grew to 52% globally in 2013, up from 25% in 2012, according to the company (Kim, 2015). However, its brand awareness comes mainly from the domestic market; thus Huawei still remains little known to consumers in other parts of the world. Huawei has a long way to go to boost its international brand familiarity. Huawei's rise is an indication that growth in the mobile-phone industry is coming mainly from emerging markets where consumers are in the process of replacing basic feature phones with smartphones. While China's increasingly saturated smartphone market is showing signs of slowing growth, Huawei is expanding rapidly to Africa, the Middle East and Latin America (Osawa & Kim, 2014). Huawei is prepared to use pricing as a way of building share in its major markets. It has also made substantial progress in design and quality, but its future remains uncertain as to whether international consumers will accept a product from an almost unknown name in preference to established brands.

Question 2 (a) Apply product life cycle (PLC) model to the smartphone market. Describe how the marketing mix changes at different stages of the PLC. Identify the current stage that smartphone business is in. Recommend actions that Huawei should take to succeed at this stage of PLC. (20 marks)

(b) Identify and describe the macro environmental forces that may influence an organisation's decision making, and affect its performance and strategies. Based on the case, identify the most dominant macro-environment force that impacts Huawei and provide justifications. Based on your analysis on the macro environmental force, discuss how Huawei should respond to the environmental force. (10 marks)

3 (a) 'Segmentation is at the heart of marketing strategy'. Examine the importance of market segmentation in the context of Huawei. (6 marks)

(b) Suggest four (4) potential market segmentation variables to Huawei [two (2) for consumer markets and two (2) for organisational markets] and discuss how these variables may be applied to segment the market. (14 marks)

(c) Demonstrate the assembly of Huawei's product mix in a table by its product mix width and product line length. (10 m