Huawei aims to have its Cloud services in 170 countries by year’s-end

China’s telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies announced on Monday (Sep 19) a target to provide Cloud data storage and application services to more than 170 countries by the end of this year.

“There’s no question that the cloud is the way of the future,” said Huawei’s rotating chairman Ken Hu in a speech beamed via video link at the start of the 3-day Huawei Connect conference in Bangkok, which was attended by over 10,000 ICT industry players. “By 2025, 95 per cent of all new digital workloads will be deployed directly on the cloud.”

Hu noted that the USA-based International Data Corp has predicted that over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed on the cloud by 2024, a total that is more than all the applications developed over the past 40 years.

At the event, Huawei announced the upcoming launch of new Huawei Cloud regions in Indonesia and Ireland. By the end of this year, under its new “Go Cloud, Go Global” campaign, Huawei Cloud will have deployed its Cloud service in 29 “regions” and 75 “availability zones” covering more than 170 countries.

Huawei, China’s largest privately owned company and of the world’s leading providers of mobile phones and digital infrastructure, brought its annual global ICT industry event to the Thai capital, marking the first time its annual flagship event was held outside of China.

Thailand has proven to be one of Huawei’s success stories in South-east Asia. Thanks in part to Huawei, Thailand is currently the leader in Asean in terms of 5G coverage with more than 20,000 stations and 4.3 million users as of last year.

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Huawei has also set up 3 data centres in Thailand, and established a Huawei Cloud Region. There are cloud regions in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, with one soon to be launched in Indonesia.)

Despite being placed on the US Trade blacklist in 2019 due to security concerns, Thailand has expressed interest to cooperate with Huawei as the company offers the technology needed to achieve the government’s goals of upgrading its industries through digital transformation, as well as attracting new value-added industries and startups to escape the so-called middle income trap.

“By 2027, the added value of the digital economy industry is expected to account for 30 per cent of Thailand’s GDP (gross domestic product),” said Chaiwut Thanakamanusorn, Thailand’s Minister of Digital Economy and Society, in a speech at the conference. “Huawei has supported Thailand to be the (regional) leader in broadband and mobile networks.”

Faced with several obstacles in the US market, Huawei has chosen to focus its growth strategy on the Asia-Pacific region which is also likely to be at the forefront of digital transformation.

“The Asia-Pacific region is standing at the forefront of the global digital landscape,” said Simon Lin, the president of Huawei Asia-Pacific. “Huawei is committed to becoming a key contributor to the digital economy in the region. We will keep supporting its digitalization and sustainable development efforts, and building out the industry ecosystem.”