Huawei sells first U.S. phone to MetroPCS

Chinese juggernaut Huawei has made its first appearance in the North American handset market, announcing today that one of its CDMA phones is now being offered by MetroPCS.

Huawei follows close on the heels of fellow Chinese competitor ZTE, which last week announced its own deal with Metro to sell a CDMA handset. The two Chinese vendors have been slowly cracking the North American market, trying to replicate the same momentum they’ve built in the Asia and Europe. The two have already inked North American infrastructure deals, Huawei winning a piece of Leap Wireless’s new advanced wireless services (AWS) network and ZTE landing several small deals with regional providers as well as part of Leap’s original PCS network.

Huawei in particular has given many global wireless vendors cause to be nervous, grabbing GSM/UMTS network deals around the world, either sharing them with traditional incumbents like Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and Alcatel Lucent or running away with the contracts outright. Global carriers like Vodafone have not only begun to include Huawei in its infrastructure contracts but has begun relying on the Chinese vendor to provide low-cost 3G handsets to its global customer base.

Huawei’s rapid growth, however, has been checked on the shores North America. Though it has one a handful of small deals it still hasn’t landed the Tier I customer the likes of Vodafone. Huawei has said it was named a finalist for T-Mobile massive UMTS build, but the contract eventually went Ericsson and Nokia Siemens. On the device side of the business, Huawei has been outpaced by ZTE, which is not only selling handsets to Metro but CDMA wireless cards through Telus. More significantly though, Sprint tapped ZTE to be one of the primary suppliers of PC laptop cards for its WiMAX launch this spring. The Metro deal is therefore a critical step for Huawei’s North American ambitions.

The phone, called the M318, is a basic clam shell phone with a WAP browser and BREW client for application downloads, but little else. The phone is clearly meant to be an entry level device for the Metro network, but neither ZTE nor Metro named a price for the phone.