China’s Controversial Tech Giant

Running head: RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Research Proposal on ‘The security threat fear against Huawei and mitigation plan to
revive the business’
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

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RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Introduction
Huawei is the second biggest smartphone manufacturer and supplier in the world after
Samsung. It has 18% more market share than Apple and other smartphone companies (Bowler,
2020). Despite such large market share, the Chinese consumer tech company is facing a huge
challenge in terms of consumer trust issue. The US Intelligence has claimed that China is using
Huawei for spying activity and this is a major blow for the company’s business in many of the
first world countries (Brandom, 2019). Thus, this paper will present a research proposal on
addressing the security threat fear around Huawei and mitigating the issue to revive the business.
It will provide an overview of the background of the research, research purpose and questions,
research design, and a schedule for budget and time for conducting the study.
Background
Huawei has been accused as a threat for national security by the United States and several
other nations. The US intelligence officials and the lawmakers have claimed that the Chinese
government has been exploiting the telecommunication giant for espionage, and that is a huge
threat for the national security, especially when the 5G technology is almost ready (Newman,
2020). Based on this serious claim, the US government has banned the American corporations
from engaging in any kind of business activities with Huawei and also banned Huawei from the
5G networks. Following this decision by the USA, several allies, and first world economies, like
Australia and New Zealand, have also joined the US against the Chinese company (Lecher &
Brandom, 2019). The Council on Foreign Relations reported that several vague Chinese
Intelligence Laws could force the telecom company to handover important data to handover to
the Chinese government creating severe threats to national security and the new 5G
infrastructure might contain backdoors that would give China the important access to the internal

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RESEARCH PROPOSAL
operations, and opportunities for Beijing to the attack the communication network as well as
other important sectors (Maizland & Chatzky, 2020). Hence, Huawei is being accused of cyber
espionage, theft of intellectual property as a U.S. jury found in 2017 that Huawei stole
intellectual property from T-Mobile and trade violations.
Although it has been denying the accusations, yet Huawei faced severe downfall in its
business due to these. It is losing its market share in the US along with Australia, New Zealand,
Taiwan and Japan (Buchholz, 2020). As reported by Aljazeera.com (2019), there was a 40% to
60% fall in the shipment of Huawei in 2019. The UK has banned Huawei from contributing its
core equipment in the 5G technology and infrastructure, which reduced its share in the UK to
35% (Buchholz, 2020). France and Germany have decided to increase security measures against
the backdoors into the communication channels.
Purpose of the research
Purpose of this research study is to investigate the impact of the US ban and accusations
on the company revenue, shipment and reputation and to find out potential measures to mitigate
the impact of the ban and revive its business.
The research objectives are:
 To examine the impact of cyber threat accusation and US ban on the revenue of Huawei
 To investigate the perception of consumers about Huawei’s products and its image
 To find out the opportunities for mitigating the impact of US ban for participating in the
5G network technology and to find new markets for business expansion