IT APPEARS that private equity groups are licking their lips at getting their collective teeth into a chunk of Huawei's mobile devices division. As a result, figures relating to the company's operations – which are normally secret – are leaking out.

For example, in 2007 this division represented 16.4 per cent of the whole company's revenues compared to just 11.8 per cent in 2008. The whole division is worth about $4 billion.

Officially, the Huawei division makes modems, terminals, wireless internet cards and handsets, but the handset actually account for around 50 per cent of the division's total sales. So that's 8.2 per cent of total Huawei sales.

Which would seem to suggest that Huawei is a bigger global vendor of handsets than most analysts currently estimate.

As INQ readers may recall, Huawei has already established itself as the leading supplier of 3G USB dongles.

One of the greatest ironies of this situation is that Bain Capital is seen as probably the most likely candidate to secure the stake in Huawei. It had previously aligned with Huawei to purchase 3com until US protectionism killed off the deal. µ