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China is making plans to cull foreign technology, in an effort to move over to Chinese suppliers in certain markets.
Bloomberg reports that the targeted tech will be from banks, military, state-owned enterprises and key government agencies, all to be replaced by Chinese firms by 2020.
The incentive to use local suppliers comes after a test of domestic alternatives in the northeastern city of Siping, where workers replaced Microsoft Windows with a Chinese developed OS called NeoKylin, and swapped out foreign servers for ones made by the country’s Inspur Group Ltd.
Security concerns had previously been raised by Edward Snowdon, who revealed significant spying by the US’ National Security Agency (NSA), accusing the agency of hacking into computers at Tsinghua University.
Regulators in China recently seeked anti-trust probes against Western companies such as Microsoft and Qualcomm Inc.
China is making significant moves away from such foreign tech with the banning of Windows 8 from government computers and Apple’s iPads being removed from procurement lists.
Charlie Dai, a Beijing-based analyst for Forrester Research, said: “We have seen emerging cases of replacing foreign products at all layers from application, middleware down to the infrastructure software and hardware.”
Maybe China is on to something by sticking to homegrown suppliers – is there a possibility the UK could go the same way?
PCR will be delving into the British PC manufacturing industry in our upcoming February issue
