Huawei Commits to Supporting Thai Society as a Continuous Social Value Contributor

34 years ago, Huawei was a startup with a registered capital of 5000 dollars. It started out in an apartment in Nanshan district, Shenzhen, and has now developed into a global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. Within a short 34-year history, Huawei is now serving one-third of the world's population in more than 170 countries and regions. In 2021, Huawei ranked 44th in the Fortune Global 500 and now ranks 3rd in the 2020 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard.

Carrying with it the vision of bringing digital to every person, home, and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world, in 1999, Huawei established its office in Bangkok and has committed to supporting Thailand’s digital journey and social development since then.

In the past 22 years of development in Thailand, one of Huawei’s strategic overseas market, Huawei has been providing customers with competitive, secure, and reliable end-to-end portfolio of products, solutions, and services in fields of communications networks, IT, smart devices, cloud services and digital power. This has strongly supported the government’s visionary Thailand 4.0 strategy and Industry 4.0 roadmap.

More importantly, Huawei believes that technologies should be developed for creating greater social values. Through open collaboration with ecosystem partners, we are dedicated to creating lasting value for our customers, working to empower people, enrich home life, and inspire innovation in organizations of all shapes and sizes.

Fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic with ICT Technologies

In the past several years, we’ve held strong in the face of adversity. During the pandemic, applications developed on the basis of 5G, AI, cloud, and big data have played a significant role during the outbreak, for example, in daily communications, remote education and telework.

As a responsible local citizen, starting from the early outbreak of COVID-19 in Thailand, Huawei has been closely working with Thai government and hospitals to protect people and elevate the country’s digital healthcare industry.

In March 2020, Huawei donated 7 sets of telemedicine video conferences to Thailand hospitals and Disease Control Department. The donations, totaling around 10 million baht, enabled medical experts across Thailand to work with frontline medical staff to conduct remote online consultations and monitoring.

At the peak of the pandemic, the number of patients usually exceeds the treatment capacity of the hospital. To solve this problem, Huawei donated AI-Assisted Service to Ramathibodi and Siriraj Hospital, which provided COVID-19 Diagnosis Results in as quick as 25 seconds per case.

As the pandemic situation develops in Thailand, Huawei managed to donate 500,000 face masks and speed up the integration of 5G in Thailand’s smart healthcare. In June 2020, Huawei joined NBTC and Siriraj Hospital to initiate Unmanned Vehicle Pilot Project for the first time in Thailand. The autonomous car offered safe, convenient and cost-effective solutions while reducing workload for healthcare worker. In December, Huawei and Siriraj hospital signed a MOU of "5G Powered Smart Hospital Enabled with Cloud and AI", which also marks the initial step in establishing Thailand’s first 5G smart state hospital. With joint efforts, in 2020, Siriraj Hospital won the title of “The Most Innovative 5G Trial in APAC” by ConnectTech Asia.

After the third wave of pandemic broke out earlier 2021, Huawei joined hands with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society in donating 5G telemedicine, InPatient area Intelligent Management, and eLTE broadband trunking to Bang Khun Thien field hospital, worth more than 6 million THB. And then we quickly organized four batches of donation campaigns to support Thai hospitals, community and foundation to enhance their capacity.

Cultivate A Strong Digital Talent and SME/Startup Ecosystem

When we apply ICT technologies to address ongoing pandemic challenges, we always look ahead into the intelligent future. As Huawei believes that key to drive digital development lies in an upskilled talent foundation, we keep investing in the upskilling and reskilling of Thai workforce especially facing the upcoming S-Curve industries in Thailand.

Since 2019, we have invested around 180M THB continuously, to launch Huawei ASEAN academy to empower Thailand’s digital talent development. In 2020 alone, we trained around 16,500 people. In March this year, Huawei and Eastern Economic Corridor Office jointly opened Huawei ASEAN Academy EEC Branch, with the target to produce 6,000 digital workers within 2021 and a total of 30,000 in the next 3 years.

For ICT professional training, in October 2020, Huawei and the Department of Skill Development (DSD) under the Ministry of Labor signed MOU to strengthen Thailand's digital workforce, aiming to produce 3,000 digital skilled workers and 120 DSD personnel through ICT courses. This year, Huawei and Digital Skill Development Academy (DISDA) under the ministry of labor kicked off a seminar to share knowledge with over 100 entrepreneurs on the latest ICT technologies. Based on the positive feedbacks, we launched two rounds of online Mobile App Development Course with DISDA, a learning platform to teach hands-on app development skills for over 1,000 motivated talents.

For Small and medium-sized enterprises and startups, startups and SMEs are rapidly becoming the innovators, disruptors, and pioneers of our times. In align with Thailand 4.0 vision, Huawei r signed MOU with the New Economy Academy under the Ministry of Commerce 2020, in order to co-develop digital courses for SMEs and Generation Z in the new normal. The first digital technology course was attended by 250 SMEs. Until today, we have successfully organized all four batches of training for nearly a thousand people. From May to September, Huawei CLOUD launched the “Spark Ignite 2021 – Thailand Start up Competition” together with Thai partners. The three winners, from a total of 132 competitors across the country, will receive HUAWEI CLOUD credit worth 10 million baht and an opportunity to join Huawei Spark program underpinned by Huawei technological & innovation leadership.

As we enter the digital world, connectivity has been driving sustainable development in ways we never saw before. The pandemic highlighted that digital inclusion is more necessary and urgent than ever. To leave no one behind in the digital world, Huawei Thailand has launched several digital inclusion initiatives. For example, Huawei plan to initiate digital bus CSR project and provide digital training for rural children and adults about basic technology knowledge and practical skills.

Build A Sustainable and Low-Carbon Thailand

Climate change and environmental issues are becoming global challenges. Though carbon emissions declined over the past year due to the economic slowdown and worldwide lockdowns, emissions are rapidly rebounding as economies reopen. Shifting to a circular economy and achieving sustainable development is now a common goal for all countries.

ICT technologies are important enablers of energy conservation and emissions reduction in other industries. It is estimated that the reduction in carbon emissions in other industries enabled by ICT technologies will be 10 times the amount of carbon emitted by the ICT industry itself.

Huawei has been leveraging its extensive experience in power electronics and energy storage as well as technical expertise in 5G, cloud, and other innovative technologies, to provide digital power solutions for different industries.

In Thailand, Huawei has established its new Digital Power business in 2021, and we are continuously expanding our services to cooperate with more than 50 local partners, creating over 1,000 local indirect job opportunities. Our solutions help both telecom and tower carriers simplify facility deployment, improve power reliability, increase energy efficiency and make O&M smart, enable ICT networks to evolve to 5G and cloud smoothly.

As Thailand is the first ASEAN Countries that formally proposed and announced national carbon neutrality roadmap, Huawei will apply our leading technologies and global best practices to support Thailand toward becoming the ASEAN carbon neutral leader.

Grow in Thailand, Contribute to Thailand

Looking back at Huawei’s footprints in Thailand for the past 22 years, we’ve kept innovating to create value for our customers, to overcome the challenges with Thai society, and to support both economic growth and social progress around the world. We also took this opportunity to further accelerate digital transformation, working together with partners to support broader economic, social, and environmental goals for shared progress and prosperity.

Looking into the future, our mission remains “Grow in Thailand, Contribute to Thailand” as a leading ICT partner as well as social value contributor. In recent years, human society has encountered unprecedented challenges as well as opportunities. During this process, Huawei will stand firmly with Thai people and society to unleash the social value of ICT applications.