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PurposeCountry of origin is a well-studied topic for developed countries that have a favourable image. However, how country of origin image affects the consumers of an emerging country on a frontier market with high uncertainty avoidance still needs to be shed light. Therefore, this study investigated the relationship of country of origin image with consumer purchase intention through consumer uncertainty. The study further explored the conditional effect of brand image between country of origin and consumer uncertainty.Design/methodology/approachThe data for this study was collected from 400 Pakistani consumers. As this study assessed purchase intentions and consumer uncertainty related to high technology products of China, therefore, the consumers of the Huawei brand were selected.FindingsThe findings revealed a negative influence of country of origin image on consumer purchase intentions both directly and indirectly through consumer uncertainty. Furthermore, the positive brand image of high tech products was found to moderate the effect of country of origin image on consumer uncertainty.Originality/valueThis study is the first of its kind that explores the intervening role of consumer uncertainty between country of origin image and consumer purchase intention in an emerging market. In addition, the study highlights the importance of strong brand image as it buffers consumer uncertainty because of stereotypes.

Amid geopolitical tensions over 5G technology, concerns about foreign firms like Huawei collaborating with academia have surfaced. This paper examines Huawei’s role in Canadian research, analyzing its impact on network robustness and research themes over time. Robustness in network research has been extensively explored, yet there remains a notable gap in understanding the influence of geopolitical factors and foreign corporate presence, such as Huawei’s, on these networks. The main results of this research show that: (1) The 5G network exhibits a decreasing trend in network robustness, with the potential for fragmentation increasing over time; (2) The impact of Huawei’s removal on the network’s Largest Connected Component (LCC) is relatively minor; (3) The network retains its small-world properties irrespective of Huawei’s presence, and its removal has a minor impact on knowledge transfer efficiency; (4) Huawei’s removal does not significantly affect network centralization, nor does it influence the prevailing trend observed over time; (5) Hierarchical clustering and specificity analysis identify Huawei’s strategic focus on the silicon and optical photonic domain within the 5G research; (6) The collaboration-topic network shows a high degree of robustness, suggesting that Canada’s research contributions in these areas are unaffected by the absence Huawei. This study provides a nuanced view of Huawei’s role in Canadian 5G research, suggesting that while the company is a significant player, its impact is in general neither singular nor irreplaceable within the academic network.

As China’s global footprint expands and Sino-American competition intensifies, it is apparent that one of the most important arenas for competition between Western Liberal norms and Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) authoritarian norms is going to come in competing technologies (Western/Korean/Taiwanese 5G/chips vs Huawei 5G/chips) and competing cyber-norms (Western cyber-libertarianism vs Chinese cyber-sovereignty). Inside China, China’s technologies and its cyber-sovereign norms converge.Outside of China, while China champions the norm of cyber-sovereignty, Huawei itself may pose the greatest challenge to sovereign states’ cyber-sovereignty where Huawei controls or otherwise participates significantly as a provider for telecommunications networks, given its relationship to the Chinese state. Is China sincere in advocating cyber-sovereignty as an international norm, or is this just something it is concerned about inside China?Are the laws of China and the technologies and practices of its own Huawei antithetical to China’s own stated norms of cyber-sovereignty? Is cyber-sovereignty simply a stop-gap measure adopted by an insecure regime to justify draconian censorship and thought control at home while it seeks to use its growing presence in 5G telecommunications to expand its surveillance of foreign powers/actors worldwide? Finally, in keeping with the theme of this special issue, does digital orientalism explain the growing tension between China and some of the Western/Liberal powers as it regards competition in 5G? Is the US/West needlessly securitizing Huawei and its 5G, or is there something there worth securitizing? Clarity about these issues and the implications of the answers arrived at are important for nations around the world as China expands its technological reach via Huawei and other national champions.

This paper addresses the research gap in understanding the role of intra-firm reverse technology transfers for building output versus innovation capabilities. While we understand that some firms use external sources to create new technology before they are able to build internal innovation capability, the role of bridging lack of innovation capability through internal reverse technology transfers has not been explored in this context. We analyze the technology transfer strategy in the case of Huawei Technologies through a mixed methods design combining quantitative survival analysis of patents and qualitative interviews to understand and contextualize its mechanisms. The results show that the company strategically transferred ideas for new and complex technologies from centers of state-of-the-art technology towards its domestic Chinese locations. Tapping into offshore innovation capability is done by hiring experienced personnel that transfers innovative ideas to China instead of developing new products abroad. We find that this systematic transfer of complex ideas enabled Huawei to build output capability by bridging its lack of domestic innovation capability. This might be a way for growing firms to become competitive on the world market before having to build innovation capability at home first.

This article examines the determinants of the positioning of secondary states in the US-China conflict over market access for China’s Huawei. Our explanations draw on three branches of realism: balance-of-threat theory, patron-client theory, and Hirschman’s theory on trade relationships and foreign-policy convergence. For the dependent variable, we assemble a new dataset of the attitudes of 70 states toward Huawei’s investment aspirations. We present a series of ordered logit regression models from which three main patterns appear. First, less powerful states seem more acceptive of the Chinese company. Second, those states that rely on US security guarantees tend to be far more rejective of Huawei. Third, whereas trade with China appears to be a factor in the reasonings of other states, trade with the US is not. In sum, the patron-client theory offers the most cogent explanation of the divergence of responses to Huawei.

Smartphones now dominate the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) devices capable of collecting raw data. However, they also offer valuable research opportunities in intentional jamming, which has become a serious threat to the GNSS. Smartphones have the potential to locate jammers, but their robustness and sensitivity range need to be investigated first. In this study, the response of smartphones with dual-frequency, multi-constellation reception capability, namely, a Xiaomi Mi8, a Xiaomi 11T, a Samsung Galaxy S20, and a Huawei P40, to various single- and multi-frequency jammers is investigated. The two-day jamming experiments were conducted in a remote area with minimal impact on users, using these smartphones and two Leica GS18 and two Leica GS15 geodetic receivers, which were placed statically at the side of a road and in a line, approximately 10 m apart. A vehicle with jammers installed passed them several times at a constant speed. In one scenario, a person carrying the jammer was constantly tracked using a tacheometer to determine the exact distance to the receivers for each time stamp. The aim was, first, to determine the effects of the various jammers on the smartphones’ positioning capabilities and to compare their response in terms of the speed and quality of repositioning with professional geodetic receivers. Second, a method was developed to determine the position of the interference source by varying the signal loss threshold and the recovery time on the smartphone and the decaying carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR). The results indicate that GNSS observations from smartphones have an advantage over geodetic receivers in terms of localizing jammers because they do not lose the signal near the source of the jamming, but they are characterized by sudden drops in the CNR.

The US-China trade war forced a reluctant semiconductor industry into someone else's fight, a very different position from its leading role in the 1980s trade conflict with Japan. This paper describes how the political economy of the global semiconductor industry has evolved since the 1980s. That includes both a shift in the business model behind how semiconductors go from conception to a finished product as well as the geographic reorientation toward Asia of demand and manufactured supply. It uses that lens to explain how, during the modern conflict with China, US policymakers turned to a legally complex set of export restrictions targeting the semiconductor supply chain in the attempt to safeguard critical infrastructure in the telecommunications sector. The potentially far-reaching tactics included weaponization of exports by relatively small but highly specialized American software service and equipment providers in order to constrain Huawei, a Fortune Global 500 company. It describes potential costs of such policies, some of their unintended consequences, and whether policymakers might push them further in the attempt to constrain other Chinese firms.

Nowadays, GNSS chips inside modern smartphones deliver high-quality code and carrier phase measurements which may be applied in various mobile applications, especially in mapping applications. In this situation, the usefulness of a professional geodetic receiver is commonly met to reach centimeters and sub-centimeter accuracies. To obtain such precise positioning results, carrier-phase measurements should be used. Therefore, we decided to check the Huawei P 30 Pro smartphone GNSS-based positioning system which may be an excellent tool to fast and accurately measure the points or details which may need to be precisely mapped with accuracies within centimeters. According to the tested smartphones' postprocessing RTKLib 2.4.3 software results, we could fix all L1 ambiguities based on GPS-only satellite constellation. After the comparison to reference fixed point position, for all 1-hour static session results, positioning errors were at centimeters level of accuracy (1-5cm). For fast static surveying mode, the best results were obtained for 30-minute sessions, where average accuracy was also at centimeters level (close to the level of a professional geodetic receiver).

In the face of growing restrictions against Huawei in much of 'the West' because of the US' efforts to portray its 5G roll out as a security threat, most of the developing world has resisted such efforts. By drawing on Balzacq's analytical framework--centred on the degree of congruence between the audience, the securitizing agent's ability to construct a convincing frame of reference, the role of contextual factors, and securitization counterclaims --it is argued that 5G securitization failed in Brazil and South Africa (2019-2022). Although the contextual factors in both cases were similar (economic interests with China, Huawei's established role and access to Covid vaccines), in South Africa, narratives of development and cost/benefit considerations overshadowed perceptions of security risk. In Brazil in contrast, some factions within the Bolsonaro government agreed to the US' securitization frame, whilst others, citing the risk of damaging relations with Beijing and the sheer costs of replacing Huawei infrastructure, disagreed. In both cases, the contextual factors diminished Huawei as a source of risk, especially in the Brazilian case, tipping the scale in support of those seeking to maintain good relations with Beijing. Keywords: Geopolitics of 5G; Brazil and South Africa; Huawei, data and geopolitics.