ACCORDING to Hikvision (North America) president, Jeffrey He, Hikvision is a public company that is partially owned by 2 SOEs.
“In China, there are millions of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at the state, provincial and city level,” He told Security Sales and Integration. “Hikvision is not itself an SOE but like many other companies in China, it is partially-owned (42 per cent share) by 2 SOEs.
“While they’re much less common here, the U.S. and Canada have many companies with some contractual ties to the government. For example, there’s Boeing Aircraft, which sell 26 percent of its products to China.”
He was responding to ongoing speculation in the video surveillance market about Hikvision’s ownership structure and its relationship to the Chinese government. He also rejected talk of coded backdoors inserted into Hikvision products.
“We have not received any reports from any country that Hikvision products put out a backdoor to any government,” He said.
When SEN visited Hikvision in 2014 we were informed the birthplace of Hikvision was within a research body that developed video surveillance products for 52 Chinese institutes. In 2001, Hu Yangzhong and a colleague separated from that organisation and formed Hikvision with a team of 28 staff to manufacture video compression cards. ♦
