UNV Challenges Dahua and Hikvision Internationally

By: John Honovich, Published on Apr 21, 2016

UNV (aka Uniview) bills themselves as the 3rd largest manufacturer in China, quite large by global standards, with revenue in the hundreds of millions, but still dwarfed by the huge size of Dahua and particularly Hikvision.

UNV, like their larger Chinese counterparts, is now actively expanding internationally.

We spoke with senior management at ISC West to better understand their approach. We share this and our analysis inside.

UNV = Networking, Not Analog

The most notable difference is their focus on being an IP networking based company, rather than a video surveillance manufacturer. This is something they emphasized early and often, including references to senior employee's background working at Huawei, the Cisco of China.

Indeed, UNV was clearly not excited about analog (including HD analog), saying that it was something that they might do but certainly were not very motivated to pursue. To that end, Uniview has a similar philosophy to Axis, where the network is first, and unlike their Chinese peers, which have already heavily invested in HD analog.

Video Analytics

UNV also emphasized its video analytics / intelligent video offerings as a key differentiator. Of course, many surveillance companies make such claims and we have not tested Uniview's analytics, so we cannot assess how strong they are here. However, given UNV's disinterest in HD analog and their focus on the network, we would expect them to try to differentiate on this side.

At the show, UNV was doing a live demo of essentially happy analytics: