Huawei unveils plans to target Small and Medium Enterprise market at MWC

Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group (EBG) arrived at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year with a proposition fit for the times, emphasizing the value created by digital transformation across multiple industries and use case scenarios. Huawei has developed more than 100 scenario-based solutions, covering over 10 industries. EBG’s strategy of ‘Weaving Technologies for Industry Scenarios’ paid off — the business has been growing rapidly with Huawei’s overall revenue reaching about 636 billion Yuan in 2022.

On day two of the mobile conference, four of EBG’s senior executives took part in an hour-long panel discussion in front of journalists and partners. Their aim: to explain how EBG is playing its part in Huawei’s larger effort to help industries go digital as technology plays an increasingly important role in economy, culture, society and environment.

Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group is the one of Huawei’s three major divisions, sitting alongside its carrier business and its consumer electronics unit. EBG’s core business is the infrastructure that enables digital transformation and “scenario-based technologies” created in collaboration with a fast-growing partner ecosystem. To better meet customer needs, EBG has established business units (BUs) dedicated to certain industries such as Government Public Services, Digitalization BU and Digital Finance BU which integrate resources to efficiently serve and create value for customers, helping industries digitally transform.

To date, Huawei’s enterprise group has worked with more than half of the Fortune Global 500. Moreover, 54.8% of Huawei employees are engaged in Research and Development (R&D), which over the last decade has been supported with US$132.5 billion investment. Bob Chen, EBG Vice-President, also announced the new Small and Medium Enterprise business strategy at the MWC, which will see Huawei step up investment in this market to support these businesses as they seek to transform. EBG is also transforming its organization, channel, and IT equipment to extend its breadth in the SME-dominated markets.  Six distribution product R&D teams have been set up and more than 200 new products and solutions will be released to the SME market this year. Huawei will continue to work with partners to help more SMEs achieve digital transformation and business success.

For all of these numbers though, this was a panel discussion frequently dominated by the qualitative impacts of digital transformation. Chen cited technology deployments that have revived regional economies, limited the devastation caused by forest fires and brought high-quality teaching resources to impoverished rural neighborhoods. According to Chen, digital technologies now play an essential role in “driving the development of the economy, culture, society and environment towards an intelligent world”.

Historically, Huawei has thrived on big visions and big projects. Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Global Digital Finance, highlighted that mobile and intelligent financial services are more and more popular, and the core fields are highly digitalized. Huawei strives to accelerate technology application in six fields, including shifting from transaction to digital engagement, developing cloud-native applications and data, evolving infrastructure to MEGA, industrializing data and AI application, enhancing real-time data analysis, and moving towards a cutting-edge AI brain. In this way, we help financial customers accelerate changes, innovatively improve productivity, and make productivity visible, and speed up evolution towards the future.

Cao was one of two vertical sector specialists on the panel. The other was Hong-eng Koh, Huawei’s Global Chief Public Services Industry Scientist. With an MBA from Leeds University in the UK, Koh rose to play a leading role in Singapore’s e-Government program and spent 16 years in government roles at Oracle before joining Huawei.

Instead of driving revenue and profit, Koh told the audience that the public sector has to use what he calls “people-centric services” to remove the friction from the relationship between citizen and state. “For example, a businessman wants to open a restaurant. . . Regulations require him to transact with numerous government agencies to get the necessary permits. Digital transformation can help make this reluctant businessman more willing [to accept digital channels].”

Koh took the audience on a four minute summary of the way in which digital government can, and should, enable “digital economy and digital society”. Stops along the way included government-owned broadband and cloud services providers in Nigeria and UAE, an intelligent university campus in Macau and e-government systems in Spain and Sweden.

Much of this work is achieved in collaboration with EBG’s 35,000-strong partner ecosystem, represented on stage by Haijun Xiao, President of Global Partner Development and Sales. Xiao’s worldwide brief is vast: 25,000 sales partners, 8,000 solution development and services partners, 2,400 training courses, and ICT academies working with 2,200 universities.

Here, too, discussions about value are noticeable. EBG has invested significantly in its partner ecosystem in recent years, signaling continued commercial momentum and increasing maturity. Xiao knows the value of his partners, and wants to keep them onside. “We adopt mutual benefits through open collaboration,” he says. “We adopt fair, just, transparent and simple partner policies.” This year, Huawei is building end-to-end capabilities from R&D, marketing, sales, supply, and service systematically, centering on “partner-centricity”.

In Huawei’s corporate calendar, the congress is one of the last big public events to take place before the privately-held company reveals its annual financial performance. Chen hinted at what we’re likely to hear in the near future: continuing rapid growth at EBG. EBG will be working with partners to help more SMEs go digital and succeed in 2023.

This year’s theme of the value generated by digital transformation is designed to perpetuate that track record of success in what seem likely to be more uncertain times.

Find out more about Huawei’s MWC program here.