Huawei is going after digital transformation

Huawei has set its sights on the digital transformation boom.

CFO and current rotating chairperson Sabrina Meng told the company’s annual analyst event on Wednesday that with 170 countries rolling out transformation plans "digitalization is a blue ocean for the whole industry.”

By the middle of the decade the global digital economy would drive 24% of economic growth, with digital transformation spending expected to reach $3.4 trillion, she said, citing industry research. She added “Huawei will keep investing in domains like connectivity, computing, storage and cloud."

Figure 1:
(Source: Huawei)

Meng said Huawei brought to the table its technology strengths in cloud, computing and network infrastructure, and the partner ecosystems it had developed around software initiatives such as Harmony and Euler and the MindSpore AI framework.

It also has a fast-growing enterprise portfolio and its continuing investment in the Pangu industrial AI platform.

Huawei seeks partners

Meng pointed to Xinyi Glass, China’s biggest glass manufacturer and a Huawei customer, which had shaved up to 400 million Chinese yuan (US$58million) a year off its gas bill after integrating its IT and operational data.

She also referred to Huawei’s own experience in digitizing its business over nearly ten years. She said the process was about strategic planning and strategic choices and had to be “driven by strategy, not technology."

Meng made an appeal for more partnerships, again citing Huawei’s own record in its contributions to standards and open source and its large cloud and developer communities.

The company has a respectable record in growing new segments beyond its core carrier equipment business. Huawei handsets ranked in the global top five until kneecapped by US sanctions.

With its carrier business constrained and the handset unit a fraction of its former size, Huawei has achieved some scale in enterprise and cloud. Enterprise sales reached CNY133 billion ($19.31 billion) last year while the cloud unit achieved CNY45 billion ($6.5 billion).

In a panel session, Charles Ross, head of technology and society at Economist Impact, cautioned that businesses were not getting enough out of their digital transformation investments.

He said the process needed business leaders who understood the technologies and how to align them with their business goals. Businesses also needed to hire staff with the necessary digital skills, he said.

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— Robert Clark, Contributing Editor, special to Light Reading