Italy’s business elite – senior executives from blue-chip companies such as Telecom Italia and Vodafone plus high-ranking government officials – filled a renaissance palazzo across from Milan’s gothic cathedral this summer to court one of the country’s biggest foreign investors.
Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker, opened its only microwave research and development centre outside China in Milan in 2008. The company, whose name means “splendid achievement” in Chinese, had brought people together to announce plans to double the size of its R&D staff in Europe to 1,700 by 2017.
The company, which is effectively excluded from doing business in many sectors in the US because of lawmakers’ concerns over its technology and potential national security implications, has invested €500m in Europe and there is a hunger for more, says William Xu, a Huawei board member in charge of marketing and strategy. Prime minister Matteo Renzi’s Italian government is particularly “open and collaborative”, he says. For China, the country offered an evocative base.