ZTE Corporation: Global Telecom Leader

Introduction

ZTE Corporation is a telecommunication and information technology company who is a global leader across the world. Originally ZTE Corporation in founded in the year 1985 in both the places of Hong Kong and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. The mission and vision of ZTE Corporation makes them enable the connectivity and trust to the wider community. ZTE Corporation’s motive is to be connected with the world through the techniques of continuous and upgraded innovations for contributing towards a better future of the society. According to the researches and studies revealed, ZTE Corporation reported their annual revenue of RMB 90.74 billion along with registering a growth rate graph of about 6.1 per cent till 2019. The assignment here will be discussing the strategies which a company acquired in order to succeed in the internationalisation of their products and expanding their services and products globally. The writing here highlights the external and both internal factors also that have either negative or positive impact on the ZTE Corporation. A brief scenario of the ZTE Corporation is discussed below to state the market hold, brand image and product positioning in the market. There comes a section where the future plans and strategies of ZTE Corporation are detailed to present their plans for the industry in the coming years. The statistical data of the Chinese company ZTE Corporation hold the total number of employees of around 70,066 in their in year 2019. The top five telecommunication and information technology competitors of ZTE Corporation are like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, HTC and Alcatel. ZTE Corporation according to the studies says that it holds the rank of 1st place in the CPE industry with a percentage of about 14 per cent of the total market share. It holds the rank of 4t largest vendor of smartphones with a total of 5 per cent of market share.

Analysis of external environment

The external analysis of a company mainly focuses on the external factors like political issues, environment laws and regulations, technological hindrances and such other aspects which impacts on a company in both positive and negative way. The external factors which impacts ZTE Corporations are those which are discussed below in a PESTELE Analysis form.

PESTLE Analysis

The external factors which are detailed in the above mentioned table highlights all those elements and factors which affects and impacts the business functioning of ZTE Corporation in both negative and positive ways.

Current business position of ZTE Corporation

ZTE Corporation Capabilities

ZTE Corporation is a popularly known telecommunication and information technology company. It has the complete telecommunication product line all across the world which covers almost every vertical sector of core networks, wireless networks, terminal markets and access & bearer networks. It has its own creative & independent R&D ability strategies, customer oriented strategies and market driven strategies which are quite unique from other brands. ZTE Corporation utilises their expertise for providing an end-to-end tailored solution set to specifically meet the demands of their customers round the globe (zte.com.cn, 2020). They are fully capable of producing and developing the market leading, world-class technologies in switching, wireless, data, access, handsets, optical transmission & telecommunication software. They committed its customers and the potential market to provide all possible integrated end-to-end innovations and develop value and excellence to the businesses, carriers, customers, enterprise network, and government and to the society. ZTE Corporation promised to serve their best to over 160 countries all over the world wherever they can enable their productivity and connectivity (Ansoff et al. 2018).

ZTE Corporation business model

ZTE Corporation basically founded themselves in year 1985 and introduced to the people of both Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. There are spread in many countries like Indonesia, Germany, India, Australia, United States, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Romania, Singapore, Myanmar and many more places (zte.com.cn, 2020). They are basically engaged in specialising in products such as BSS/OSS, big data services and products to all the telecom operators, Smart city & industry products, information and communication technological products and services to government and enterprises. ZTE Corporation has their core values of respecting each other with being faithful to all the ZTE Causes. As stated by Dzwigol (2020), they serve with full dedication being fully committed to their customers and endeavouring products and services with creativity to establish the name of ZTE as a popular brand. Somehow they have succeeded in doing that because now they are a well-known telecommunication brand all over the world.

ZTE Corporation internationalisation strategies

International strategies of every company are those internal set policies which are applied in the external market to gain the competitive advantages and hold the market share profitably. Global or international strategy primarily defines the organisational method guide to globalisation, connecting to the world and allowing the business revenues to expand beyond the home country borders. ZTE Corporation always opted for reshuffling and renewing their international as well as home country strategies to be updated in the competition. Recently ZTE Corporation boosted their international sales by seeking new measure like introducing new product launches in segments like IMS, FTTx, picocell and others (Alborov et al. 2017). ZTE Corporation facilitated a well-established and updated R&D system in their domestic as well as international market like Europe, Pakistan, US, India and other places too (zte.com.cn, 2020). Each of the place products are specialised in different area products or technology according to the requirements, trends and demands of the community. The most workable way through which ZTE took entry in the foreign market is increasing the sales in addressable foreign markets where they can gain the product licenses easily and making them capable of taking participation in the interoperability tests. The current alliances that ZTE Corporation made are with the suppliers who are in major positions in the global market as operators such as Vodafone & Telefonica (Konovalova et al. 2018). Through these kinds of partnerships and alliances ZTE Corporation will get benefit in the overseas expansions. Once Vice-President of ZTE Corporation Mr. Cheng Lixin quoted in any of his interviews that “Only a truly localised company will have a chance to succeed in the US”. Following this strategy they tried their best to adjust as a local company and also tried to impress the US customers with high quality- low price products. ZTE Corporation utilised the Integration-Responsiveness (IR) approach in their internationalisation strategies. As this approach says the two main strategical needs for globalisation- one is to integrate the value chain activities internationally and other is to create and introduce those products or processes which are highly responsive in the market both domestic and global. According to Hitt and Duane Ireland (2017), ZTE Corporation utilised their powers like cross-fertilisation, synergy and worldwide efficiency to take maximum advantage of the market in other countries. The global integration made by ZTE Corporation helped them in converging the demand patterns of different communities, diffusing the uniform local technology, measuring the need to monitor their competitors, spread their brand globally and using the pan-regional media availability (zte.com.cn, 2020).

SWOT Analysis of ZTE Corporation

All the above mentioned elements of ZTE Corporation’s internal analysis are inter-related with each other. The strengths produce new opportunities and the weaknesses create threats. Whereas the contrasting this previous concept the opportunities will remit the weaknesses and the strengths will resolve the threats. Thus, the internal analysis of ZTE revealed the functional and ethical aspects of the company which needs to be improved and developed regularly.

Strategies for the future

ZTE Corporation was always updated and advanced according to the growing competition and rising demand or changing trends. They always pre-plan their strategies which are strength for them to easily adapt them when needed. While talking about future plans and strategies ZTE Corporation resealed few announcements and press news about their upcoming innovation plans (zte.com.cn, 2020).

Unification with various brands

ZTE Corporation as a large scale international telecommunications, consumer technology solutions providers regarding the mobile networks and internet has signed a cooperative agreement along with the KT Corporation. As disclosed by Ketchen Jr and Craighead (2020), the agreement says that soon this joint agreement will move towards the research work on introducing 5G mobile internet technology which will soon be commercialised to the market and the consumers. According to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between both of KT and ZTE, The collaboration will soon going to launch a construction of 5G Test Bed in Seoul. Schilling and Shankar (2019) opined that the construction will jointly develop and design the 5G technology network for the future based architectural Test Bed. According to the strategy of developing the latest 5G internet network by ZTE, it will make them the first ever global vendor to propose the Pre5G network concept integrating the RRU and the BBU at the Pre5G base stations (Alborov et al. 2017). These Pre5G base stations will be highly enhanced in the spectral and efficient that the other fourfold which was previously used by the massive MIMO technology. The agreement between KT and ZTE will help in advancing the standardisation and improvement in the industry ecosystem on global basis (hindawi.com, 2020). This agreement was announced by the duo at the conference Mobile World Congress Shanghai which took place at Shanghai.

Launch of new handsets

ZTE Corporation recently in this year held an event in China that announced the launch of a new smartphone named the Blade 20 Pro with a 5G internet network technology. This is quite a major and big announcement after this epidemic period (Ansoff et al. 2018). The main strategic plan of ZTE Corporation for future is the plan to introduce more collaborations and unifications with various other brands and companies. In a recent press event the president of ZTE Corporation announced that three of the major mobile brads named Nubia, Red Devil/ Red Magic and ZTE itself will unify and introduce something advanced, creative and innovative product in the coming years (zte.com.cn, 2020). The Blade 20 Pro 5G will have the advanced level of technology in it with all new developed features which will be a giant investment for ZTE Corporation in the coming year outlines. As opined by Ketchen Jr and Craighead (2020), this initiative will give ZTE Corporation wide leap in their business graph making them to become more developed across the world.

Developing latest upgraded 5G technology

For the coming future times, ZTE Corporation is planning to have more and more offline retail expansion for their business growth and extensions all over the world. ZTE Corporation’s higher authority members such as president and vice-president revealed that they are soon planning to announce latest expansions of all of their physical retail stores presenting the new constructions of up to more 5000 new retail stores all across china (Bergh et al. 2017). They are also planning that if this initiative will become a success then later on they can also move towards expansion of their physical retail stores across other foreign countries also where they already exist in the respective markets. As per their thinking a strong presence of offline retail stores is very much important for any of the consumer technology company brand. The brands who originally start their business with online store brands only, hey eventually later on as per the customer demands have to create their offline retail stores to create their offline presence in the market (tandfonline.com, 2020). So, ZTE Corporation says that they will do this as soon as possible so that with the launch of their first batch of the ZTE 5G experienced mobiles can starts coming from next year, they can enter in the physical retails stores.

1+2+N Strategy of ZTE Corporation

The higher authorities and executives of ZTE Corporation have announced that their next target focus will be on planning strategies to create the brand image in a whole new way. These strategies will mainly highlight the elements of handsets like quality of the phones, latest technological features (Bindra et al. 2019). These latest features in the mobile phones will be basically those which will attract the young and ne generation people keeping them at centre. The young and new generation people mostly get attracted to those smartphones which gives will them high display quality, long life battery power, latest AI camera functions and many more like these (Demir et al. 2017). So, now ZTE Corporation decided to make their target focal point these kinds of young audiences who give preference to quality more than prices of the handsets. At the announcement event Ni Fei who is the head of ZTE Corporation brand was present along with the president of the Nubia company and both of them announced the new product strategy developed by them named as the 1+2+N Strategy (hindawi.com, 2020). According to the heads of those brands, this strategy will improve the integration of the mobile phone from personal to family data. It will also provide a huge plethora of connection of the smart phone products which will be linked with the ZTE Cloud function to give the consumers a seamless experience of the latest 5G internet network range (zte.com.cn, 2020). All these new strategic plans which the ZTE Corporation have either started or going to start soon states that in the coming years ZTE Corporation is planning to make huge changes in the telecommunication industry with lots of innovations and technological developments. All these strategies will somehow contribute towards improving the society and bringing positive changes in the community not only in the domestic areas but also in global aspect.

Conclusion

The above discussion on the topic of internationalisation of ZTE Corporation reveals that the company is planning to introduce a new hand set with a latest 5G network facility and with the latest technological features in the mobile phone. This writing concludes that the expansion of ZTE Corporation’s business activities in the third- world countries gave huge profitability to the form. The assignment summarises that now ZTE Corporation decided to make their target focal point these kinds of young audiences who give preference to quality more than prices of the handsets. ZTE Corporation is planning to have more and more offline retail expansion for their business growth and extensions all over the world in the coming years. The writing presents the fact that ZTE Corporation utilises their expertise for providing an end-to-end tailored solution set to specifically meet the demands of their customers round the globe. ZTE Corporation always opted for reshuffling and renewing their international as well as home country strategies to be updated in the competition. ZTE Corporation made itself fully equipped to start a new string of latest technology mobile handsets featuring 5G internet network increasing the competition globally. Therefore finally it can be concluded summarising the assignment that ZTE Corporation is planning to improve the telecommunication industry by contributing more to for the betterment of the society and the market.

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