Huawei-Google clash is an opportunity for African search engines

The commercial rupture between the US and China, especially pronounced since the start of the trade war in 2018, has set the stage for new scenarios in the global arena. While the US government’s initial broad target was Chinese manufactured imports, the trade war has since been characterised by a side-show over Huawei and other Chinese technology companies operating in the US, with the US claiming national security concerns.

On 15 May 2019, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned the export of certain US technologies to designated foreign adversaries. Among the companies most affected was Huawei, which found itself banned from making use of Google’s Android operating system (OS) on new devices. 

Equally affected by the move was Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which had previously benefited by having their product and app store pre-installed on millions of devices from a company that already had a global reach – and is still growing. From Google’s point of view, the growth of the Chinese mobile device vendor was partially associated with its own growth in emerging markets.

Huawei was eager to demonstrate that its operations would not be affected by the move. Indeed, they stated that they had already been working on their own OS for Android devices in anticipation of such an event. Known as Harmony (or Hóngméng in Chinese), the OS is yet to be launched, but it was already in development on account of another geopolitical schism – US sanctions against Iran that have been in place since 2012. It seeks to be an improvement on the Android OS by presenting an internet of things (IoT) interface.

While these moves have been widely seen as indicators of a new cold war characterised by a “digital iron curtain”, these developments nonetheless present an opportunity for other regions, including Africa. One of the areas in which the continent could take the lead is in the search engine space. 

Mobile owners increasingly use their devices for searches. So far, Huawei devices have shipped with Google as the default search platform (built into the Chrome web browser). Representing roughly 86% of all online searches, half of Google searches are in turn conducted on mobile worldwide. The number is even higher depending on the country under review. In South Africa, the number has been closer to 99% in the past 12 months, while nearly a third of all smartphones in the country are Huawei devices.

Huawei could opt to cooperate with the Chinese search giant Baidu, but so far, the Chinese search engine has struggled to penetrate markets outside of China due to linguistic challenges and concerns over censorship. It is also unlikely to split its focus away from its niche domestic market. 

On the other hand, the newness of Huawei’s own OS may mean that users will find the OS unfamiliar in the short term. Indeed, part of Huawei’s growth has relied on the seamlessness of Android in addition to the affordability of its devices and the company’s investment in high-quality visuals. The company’s chief executive officer, Ren Zhengfei, recognises this, recently stating that the company realistically hopes to surpass Android and Apple’s iOS only within the next 300 years.

African governments have spent the bulk of the trade war predictably voicing support for China, instead of actively bolstering their agricultural exports to the country to take advantage of the gap caused by Chinese retaliatory tariffs on US agricultural produce. African governments should be thinking in more pragmatic terms. 

The rupture represents an opportunity for a patchwork of default browsers on Huawei devices throughout the world and could curtail the monopoly of Google (97.74% of searches in South Africa are conducted through Google, for example), and some of the downsides it represents. Most pressing among these is the ownership of data.