Duke drops by to pay world-leader a visit

3:39pm Monday 14th May 2007

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ONE of Basingstoke's top hi-tech companies this week welcomed a royal visitor.

The Duke of York, who is the UK's special representative for international trade, was in town to meet senior management and staff of Huawei Technologies, at the company's offices, in Jays Close, on the Viables Industrial Estate.

While there, he met William Xu, president of Huawei Europe, and Edward Chen, managing director of Huawei UK.

Also at the visit were the Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire, Nigel Atkinson, the Mayor of Basingstoke and Deane, Councillor Tony Jones, and his wife Margaret, and borough council chief executive Gordon Holdcroft.

Prince Andrew had a private meeting with Mr Xu and Mr Chen before touring the company's offices, where he displayed the down-to-earth, jovial side of his personality, joking with staff.

His special visit came about following a previous encounter with Huawei - one of the world's leading networking and telecommunications equipment suppliers - at the 3GSM World Congress 2007, in Barcelona, in February.

The prince, who was at the world's premier mobile event in his role to lobby on behalf of British businesses and try to attract foreign investment to the UK, saw the company's stand and became interested in its work.

Huawei Technologies, which was established in 1988 in China and opened its European headquarters in Basingstoke in 2006, has about 300 employees in the UK, most of whom are local people based at the Viables and Faraday Office Park sites.

In 2005, Huawei was selected by BT as a preferred supplier of communications equipment for its 21 CN network strategy.

It also signed a Global Framework Agreement with Newbury-headquartered Vodafone for mobile network infrastructure and last year signed a deal with Motorola for the mobile phone giant to distribute and install Huawei's 3G equipment.