HMN Tech Brand Guidelines: Huawei Marine, a 2008 Tianjin Start & Hengtong Ownership

A Tianjin joint venture launched in 2008.

HMN Tech began as Huawei Marine Networks, a joint venture between the Chinese telecoms group Huawei and the British cable-ship operator Global Marine Systems. Lightwave reported on 19 December 2008 that the company had opened for business the previous afternoon, after an unveiling ceremony in Tianjin, and that it would be headquartered there, with research institutes and manufacturing bases in Beijing, Shenzhen and the United Kingdom. Huawei’s chief strategy officer became chairman and a Global Marine director became chief executive, the magazine said.

The two partners brought different halves of the business. English Wikipedia traces Global Marine to earlier firms including the Eastern Telegraph Company, Cable & Wireless (Marine), the General Post Office and BT Marine, and describes it as a company that installs, maintains and repairs submarine communications cables with its own fleet of cable ships. Huawei brought telecoms equipment. The trade magazine Capacity, in a profile of the venture, described its work as solutions and end-to-end services for submarine cable system operators, including project management, installation and technical support, and gave Tianjin as its headquarters.

Huawei Marine’s early projects were telecom links across seas and borders. English Wikipedia says it delivered the HANNIBAL cable for Tunisie Telecom across the Mediterranean to Italy in 2009, completed the China–Pakistan Fiber Optic Project along the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, built the Kumul Domestic Fiber Cable for Papua New Guinea and, in 2018, finished the South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) between Kribi in Cameroon and Fortaleza in Brazil. The encyclopedia’s SAIL article adds that the cable was jointly invested in by China Unicom and Camtel, that the engineering was contracted to Huawei Marine, and that the project took fourteen months and was completed in August 2018.

From Huawei Marine to HMN Technologies.

Ownership changed between 2019 and 2020. In November 2019 Converge Digest reported that Global Marine Group, then part of the US holding company HC2, had agreed to sell its 49% stake to Hengtong Optic-Electric, the Jiangsu cable maker: 30% at closing, with the remaining 19% kept under a two-year put option. Hengtong was also buying Huawei’s 51%, the report said, and would own 81% of the venture once both sales closed. English Wikipedia’s Hengtong article links Hengtong’s purchase of Huawei’s stake to US sanctions on Huawei.

In November 2020, after Hengtong completed its 81% holding, Huawei Marine was renamed HMN Technologies Co., Converge Digest reported in December 2021; it said the remaining 19% was held by a UK company, New Saxon 2019 Ltd. The company now presents itself as HMN Tech, and the trade press describes it as a Chinese subsea cable firm.

On 17 December 2021 the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security published a rule in the Federal Register adding a group of companies to its Entity List, among them HMN International Co., Ltd., Jiangsu Hengtong Marine Cable Systems and Jiangsu Hengtong Optic-Electric. The rule says the End-User Review Committee added them for acquiring and attempting to acquire US-origin items in support of military modernisation for the People’s Liberation Army, and it sets a licence review policy of a presumption of denial for items subject to US export rules. Converge Digest described HMN International as formerly Huawei Marine Networks.

The rule was an export-control measure: it requires a US licence for listed items going to the named companies. HMN Tech has gone on announcing cable systems in Asia since then, as the trade press shows.

Fibre, cable and the seabed.

Optical fibre and submarine cable are hard things to picture. The working product is a strand of glass thinner than a hair, or a cable that spends its life on the seabed, so the companies that make them borrow images from the process instead. The most familiar is the fibre itself: glowing strands fanned out against a dark ground, light running along their length and spilling from the cut ends.

Factory pictures come next. Fibre makers show preform towers, the tall draw towers where a glass rod is heated and pulled into fibre, and long rows of spools. Submarine cable makers show their ships: cable ships alongside a quay, giant circular tanks of coiled cable in the hold, and ploughs or remotely operated vehicles lowered over the stern. World maps traced with submarine routes, each line ending at a landing point on a coast, carry the same story on a website or a trade-show wall.

People appear mostly at work. Technicians splice fibre inside clean tents on a deck or a beach, engineers check repeaters on a test bench, and crews guide cable ashore at a landing site. The trade also has its own stages, such as the OFC conference for optical communications and the SubOptic conference for the submarine cable industry, where the same strands, cross-sections and route maps return on booths and slides.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, where it makes its fibre or cable, which systems it is known for, and which events in its history, from mergers to changes of owner, shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

A cable builder for carrier consortia.

HMN Tech’s recent announcements centre on Asia. In June 2026 Developing Telecoms reported that the company had declared the SEA-H2X cable ready for service: a system of about 6,000 km, owned by China Mobile International, China Unicom Global and Converge ICT, running from Hainan and Hong Kong to the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. HMN said it used its own repeaters, ultra-low-loss optical fibres and branching units with fibre and power switching on the system, which is built on an open cable architecture.

In July 2026 the same publication, in a report carried by SubTel Forum, said HMN and the Indonesian operator MoraRepublic had completed factory acceptance testing of the wet plant for MIC-3, a cable between Singapore and Batam, on which HMN is deploying two branching units of 32 fibre pairs with optical switching.

The work these reports describe is the submarine system as a whole: repeaters and branching units placed on the seabed, and the testing and project work that turn them into a link for the carriers that own it, often several carriers sharing one system, as on SEA-H2X.

For a design guide, HMN Tech shows how a company can keep its history in its initials: Converge Digest was already using “HMN” as shorthand for Huawei Marine Networks in 2019, a year before the rename. Compare Huawei, its founding partner, and Hengtong, its majority owner. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, a teal and a pale foam white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HMN Tech’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.