Skip to content
Subscriber Only
Opinion
Anjani Trivedi

China’s Spy-Tech Star Needs Some Covert Help

Subsidies from Beijing are playing a bigger role in earnings amid a backlash against the surveillance industry.

Earnings watch.

Earnings watch.

Photographer: VCG/Visual China Group/Getty Images

Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. is feeling the effects of a backlash against the surveillance business. Lucky the company has a powerful backer in Beijing.

China’s biggest maker of spy-tech equipment posted its slowest quarterly growth in eight years, missing analysts’ estimates with a 14.7 percent increase in revenue and a 13 percent gain in net profit from a year earlier in the three months through September.