HUAWEI has turned to humor to burnish its reputation in Germany, as the under-pressure networks group seeks to defend its leading position in Europe’s largest market against concerns it poses a security threat.

Billboards posted around Berlin ask whether fifth-generation (5G) mobile services will soon be more widespread than dog poop in the capital, while as Germany’s ruling party elected a successor to Chancellor Angela Merkel in Hamburg last week, Huawei’s stand was decked out with tongue-in-cheek slogans.

“Mutti — are we nearly in new land yet?” a sulking boy asks in one, an ironic reference to Merkel’s widely ridiculed comment in 2013 that the internet was “new land for all of us.”

The Shenzhen-based global telecom giant first set up operations in Germany in 2001.

“Our target group is very much decision makers,” Patrick Berger, head of media affairs at Huawei’s Berlin office, said of the campaign, launched a month ago as some German policymakers urged Berlin to consider excluding Huawei.

Germany’s interior ministry said that it sees no legal grounds to exclude any vendor from supplying 5G gear, while the network regulator has included no security requirements in its blueprint for a forthcoming 5G spectrum auction.

The campaign is titled “Huaweiterdenken” — a compound word translatable as “Thinking ahead with Huawei” — and seeks to highlight how its technology is helping people as lifestyles change.

To soothe concerns, Huawei, which sells services to Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefonica Deutschland, has opened an information security lab in Bonn.

Germany’s information security regulator said this “significantly improved” its ability to scrutinize the information and cyber security of equipment.(SD-Agencies)