Mobile phone and networking company
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (Huawei) plans to move into cloud computing. Huawei, which has headquarters in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, was established in 1987. With total mobile phone shipments in 2016 reaching 104 million units, it is the third biggest mobile company globally after Samsung and Apple. However, its move into the cloud was prompted by its weakest profit growth in five years.
Huawei fully intends to compete in the Chinese public cloud arena with the likes of Alibaba and IBM partner Dalian Wanda Group - China’s biggest providers. The company has also stated its intention to compete with western giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a worldwide market that Gartner projects will be worth US$383 billion by 2020.
In a bid to compensate for reduced mobile phone revenues, Huawei will bring in 2000 more staff to man its cloud activity. The company’s projections suggest its cloud revenue will reach 10 billion yuan ($1.44 billion) by 2020.
"We used to focus on private cloud and did well," suggested the President of Huawei’s new cloud unit at an annual analyst meeting. "Now the purpose is to strengthen our public cloud offering."
"I believe we can build upon our advantages accumulated over the years," added Huawei's deputy board chairman Eric Xu. "Compete and coexist with AWS and Microsoft, I believe that is the trend we are going to see. Our strategic focus will be on our telecom partners' cloud transformation," he added.
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