Dubai: The Middle East remains a significant market for Huawei as both a growth driver and a region where it contributes to building a better connected world, a top official told Gulf News.
Last year, the collective Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region contributed 35 per cent to the total global revenue, with the region’s revenue up approximately 20 per cent year on year.
“The growth has in part been a result of ambitious projects planned with nearly all of the region’s leading telecom operators,” said Peng Xiongji, general manager of Huawei UAE.
He said that many of these projects have focused on better monetising the region’s high-speed mobile broadband services, improving customer experience management, and establishing more locally-based research and development facilities for the telecom sector.
The enterprise market has also been a “huge opportunity” for us over the past year. In countries like UAE, he said the government vision for the Dubai Smart City initiative has only propelled the ICT sector forward.
“We see the ICT industry as a whole now moving towards more open standards and ecosystems. This enables the full industry chain to become a powerful engine driving the advancement of other sectors,” he said.
According to research firm Gartner, 100 billion connections are expected by 2025, with experts predicting worldwide IT spending to total $3.8 trillion in 2015, a 2.4 per cent increase over 2014.
The Middle East is growing significantly faster as mobile penetration has skyrocketed — upwards of 100 per cent in some markets — with overall IT spending estimated to have increased eight per cent last year alone.
Xiongji said that consumers in the UAE today also expect a consistent experience across screens.
“Our strategy to focus on mid to high-end consumer devices has resulted in significant achievements in product R&D, brand awareness, channel development and growth in market share,” he said.
The Chinese company’s R&D expenditure totalled about $6.6 billion in 2014.
“We believe that the key to opening up a new digital industrial era will require delivering on three value propositions to the public — ubiquitous broadband, agile innovation and more inspired experiences,” he said.
He said that businesses are also being pressured to launch new products and services into the marketplace in a better and faster way, which means driving upgrades in mobility, cloud computing, Big Data, and social networking infrastructure.
Across all of these trends, he said the major driving force is R&D. No matter how the economic environment changes, “we believe that only by continuously investing in technology will we be able to provide the highest returns to our customers,” he said.
Approximately 66 per cent of its global revenues are generated from its work with telecom carriers, which is its largest and most mature business group worldwide.
Its enterprise and consumer business groups account for approximately seven per cent and 26 per cent of its global revenues, making them its fastest expanding divisions within the company.
“We are expecting continued growth over the next five years and aim to keep upwards of 10 per cent annual growth in 2015. The addressable market for us in the enterprise ICT space is even larger than that in the telecommunications market, which also offers us high growth potential,” he said.
The company is seeking to create more value through software and services and is well-positioned to achieve steady growth in its carrier business.
He said the smart device category is further experiencing huge global expansion, and Huawei plans to improve its market share as its product capabilities and portfolios are advancing quickly.