In the year 2019, the Trump administration’s ban on Chinese telecom vendors Huawei and ZTE marked the beginning of a global war against the rising influence of the telecom giants, spanning continents from Europe to Africa and Asia. The move was a calculated geopolitical strategy by the US and allies like Australia and the UK to prevent China from gathering intelligence. After dilly-dallying for years, India banned Huawei from participating in its 5G rollout in 2021, following a deadly clash in Galwan Valley that claimed lives on both sides. Other Southeast Asian countries have since followed suit. Huawei was the world’s largest telecom tech company, having outcompeted European giants Ericsson and Nokia. There is another Chinese tech company that has gradually swept the global markets—not in telecom, but in video surveillance: Hikvision. In 2017, the company held 22% market share globally. Chinese surveillance companies like Hikvision and Dahua have faced increasing challenges in recent years. The US telecom regulator Federal Communications Commission banned Chinese camera companies in November 2020, while the UK and Australia took similar action in the same month and more recently, respectively. In India, the company claims to own more than 35% market share of the INR 5,000 crore surveillance market - Hikvision and Dahua have both been doing business with Indian government agencies for more than a decade. They are deeply embedded in the Indian surveillance tech market. While one arm of the Indian government has technically banned Chinese companies from supplying to the government agencies, it is only a partial ban. The companies continue to supply to the public and the private sector, and the situation is less likely to change in near future. Stopping the advance of Chinese surveillance companies will not be easy,
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