Seize New Digitalization Opportunities to Create New Value for Industries

Nicholas Ma

President of Huawei Asia Pacific Enterprise Business Group

In 2020, one of the most serious pandemics in history swept across the world — the impact was profound, as we know all too well. COVID-19 has dramatically changed how people live, work, and create value. As such, it has driven the increasing convergence of the digital and physical worlds. It has also supercharged the digital transformation of industries and thousands of industries are being reshaped, marking an epochal shift.

A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic Has Supercharged the Digital Transformation of Industries

Digital transformation has entered a new stage of development, as it offers much-needed certainty in the climate of extreme uncertainty resulting from the resurgence of COVID-19 and a sluggish economic recovery. This new stage is defined by four trends.

First, digitalization is picking up pace and expanding into more industries. The first stage of digitalization was dominated by Internet enterprises. Today, traditional industries — such as manufacturing, education, healthcare, finance, transportation, and energy — are now also adopting 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other new digital technologies, as well as developing new business models. According to the leading global provider of market intelligence, International Data Corporation (IDC), by 2022, 70% of organizations will be using digital technologies to change their business processes and improve the customer experience, productivity, and resilience, to foster sustainable development.

Second, as new technologies like AI continue to mature, the application of digital technologies in enterprises is expanding beyond the office and into production systems — this brings industries into a new phase of intelligent upgrade. Huawei's Global Industry Vision (GIV) 2025 predicts that, by 2025, 97% of large enterprises will use AI and 77% of all cloud applications will be powered by AI.

Third, all cloud is also an inevitable trend. Due to the pandemic, enterprises will move to the cloud one to three years earlier than previously expected. We estimate that, by 2025, all enterprises worldwide will use cloud technologies. Cloud will greatly reduce the barriers for all types of enterprises to adopt advanced digital technologies, laying a solid foundation for enterprises to go digital.

Finally, digitalization is an all-encompassing transformation across multiple domains and levels. It is no less challenging than starting an entirely new business. When an enterprise makes the shift from informatization to digitalization, it has to make fundamental changes to its development model, with the core of digitalization lying in business transformation.

In this process, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) serves as a cornerstone and a main driving force. More and more enterprise managers want to use new digital technologies to drive the transformation and upgrade of their production and decision-making systems. We believe that technological innovation will be the main driving force for industry development over the next 10 years.

Developing Innovative Scenario-Specific Solutions to Help Customers Succeed

Huawei's Enterprise business team puts customers at the center of everything they do. Together, with industry partners, we apply innovative ICT to satisfy customer needs in key business scenarios. We continue to develop scenario-specific solutions to help a range of industry customers in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region accelerate digital transformation and cope with the challenges brought by the new environment.

For government customers, we have worked with partners to provide e-government cloud, smart government, and other solutions and services powered by 5G and cloud computing technologies. We help customers build service-oriented digital systems, and enhance the digital ecosystem for innovative services. This will boost the development of Smart Cities and drive the digital economy.

In the financial industry, we have offered multiple HUAWEI CLOUD-based ICT product portfolios and worked with domestic and international partners to accelerate the intelligent upgrade of financial institutions. Specifically in the APAC region, we focus on six scenario-specific solutions: financial cloud, digital banking, data center construction, data center integration, financial services, and smart bank branches. In 2020, Huawei stood out from 64 technology companies to win the Most Valued Technology Partner of the Year 2020 award from the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS).

In the energy industry, Huawei has worked with its partners to develop intelligent power plants, smart grids, intelligent oil and gas fields, and many other scenario-specific solutions. These efforts are helping the energy sector transform toward green, low-carbon, secure, and efficient development. We have also helped a number of electric power companies in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia build next generation power communications networks, providing customers with secure, reliable, compatible, cost-effective, and efficient, modern smart grid systems with simplified Operations and Maintenance (O&M).

In the transportation industry, we have developed a set of comprehensive solutions, including smart aviation, smart urban rail, smart highways, smart logistics, smart railways, and smart ports. Our solutions cover all major forms of transportation and logistics, elevating the safety, security, efficiency, and experience of the transportation industry to a whole new level.

In the education industry, we have provided a number of joint solutions — such as smart campus, smart classroom, and online education solutions — for educational institutions and universities across APAC, including Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Thailand, and Malaysia. These solutions have ensured that learning never ceases, even during the pandemic. Huawei's education solutions have also helped Thailand's King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) go digital, making "Connected KMUTT" a reality.

And in the Internet industry, Huawei has provided its customers with Internet connectivity, data center infrastructure, and HUAWEI CLOUD solutions, helping them address the challenges brought by surging network traffic and higher demands for computing power during the COVID-19 pandemic. Huawei's efforts have also helped the Internet industry go optical and intelligent.

With the rapid development of cloud computing and AI, Internet data center infrastructure faces unprecedented challenges, with new needs for ultra-large scale, fast rollout, high density, and ultra-low power consumption solutions. Huawei FusionDC 2.0, a prefabricated modular data center infrastructure solution, integrates prefabricated modular technologies to support modular designs. Each module is prefabricated and commissioned before delivery, which shortens the Go-To-Market (GTM) time by 50%. The solution also improves Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) by 8–15% and maximizes a data center's Total Value of Ownership (TVO) by integrating advanced power electronics and temperature control and heat management technologies.

Huawei has secured the largest share in the prefabricated modular data center market for five consecutive years. Huawei's prefabricated modular data center solutions have been deployed, among others, by Dubai International Airport, Nepali carrier Ncell, and the HUAWEI CLOUD bases in Dongguan and Ulanqab. Elsewhere, our intelligent data center solution has helped 1-Net Singapore build intelligent, green data centers. This solution reduces energy consumption by more than 10% compared to legacy solutions, contributing to the digital, low-carbon economy.

In terms of services, as more advanced technologies are being widely used in enterprise production systems, these systems are becoming more complex and more critical. As a result, operational and maintenance processes now need to be highly automated, to facilitate fault prediction and proactive prevention. Huawei works with its partners to closely align service capabilities and solutions with industry scenario requirements, through five capabilities: consulting and planning, industry solution services, operations, maintenance, and talent development. Through these efforts, we aim to deliver a consistent and high-quality service experience to our customers.

As of December 2020, 253 Fortune 500 companies had selected Huawei as their digital transformation partner. Huawei's products and solutions have been deployed in more than 700 cities and are used by over 2000 financial institutions and manufacturing enterprises and more than 190 electric power companies worldwide.

Our products and solutions — such as HUAWEI CLOUD, intelligent Internet Protocol (IP) networks, intelligent OptiX networks, computing, data centers, data storage, and 5GtoB — have become increasingly competitive within the market. By combining a number of our cutting-edge products, we are working to meet customers' diverse needs, drive enterprise transformation and upgrade, and create new value for industries.

Create a Thriving Partner Ecosystem for Shared Success in the Digital Era

In 2020, revenue from our enterprise business was CNY100.3 billion, a year-on-year increase of 23.0%. This would have been impossible without the strong support of our partners.

By the end of 2020, over 30,000 partners were working with us worldwide to serve the enterprise market. In the APAC region, we had established relationships with over 7900 partners in the enterprise market.

In addition, by the end of 2020, more than 19,000 partners had joined the HUAWEI CLOUD Partner Network (HCPN) and over 4000 applications had been launched on the HUAWEI CLOUD Marketplace. In total, we have brought together 1.6 million developers, creating a thriving partner ecosystem.

Huawei continues to enhance enablement and support for its partners in the APAC region. In 2020, Huawei held more than 200 training activities for partners and invested more than US$3 million into the market fund for partners, which is mainly used to support joint market development with strategic and core partners. Thanks to these measures, core partners generated 30% more revenue from their collaboration with Huawei compared with the previous year.

In addition, Huawei attaches great importance to creating a talent ecosystem for the ICT industry. In 2020, Huawei worked with more than 180 universities and colleges in APAC, offered numerous training courses. In total, we trained over 2000 ICT students.

In the future, Huawei will increase investment in partner incentives, and strive to build a diverse ecosystem that is open, collaborative, and thrives on shared success.

APAC has an incredibly robust and dynamic economy. Accelerating the digital economy has, by and large, become a consensus among all countries in the region. Huawei will work with partners to better understand the business needs of the region's industry customers, integrate innovative ICT with their business strategies, and help these customers cope with the challenges of digital transformation. Together, we will create new value for diverse industries, and light up the future with digitalization.