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Huawei to grow SA operations [ITWeb]
[November 10, 2014]

Huawei to grow SA operations [ITWeb]


(ITWeb Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Huawei wants to emerge as one of SA's top three smartphone makers within the next three years, says Huawei's MD of consumer business Peter Hu.

Telecoms giant Huawei has its sights set firmly on South African soil, with the company's 2015 strategy including a significant bolstering of its local workforce, advanced wireless solutions and local deployment of its software-defined network (SDN) tools.



The ICT solutions company and smartphone maker says SA – which it calls Africa's ICT hub – is its most important market on the continent. While many other companies in the space are carrying out retrenchment programmes for leaner local operations, Huawei plans to hike its South African staff complement by 50% over the next five years.

David Wang Shunli, director of public affairs and communication for Huawei Eastern and Southern Africa region, points out the company has had an African presence for about 13 years now, and SA is one of the group's chief growth markets.


"We have over 7 000 employees, with 1 000 of these in SA, about 60% of which are South African. Over the next five years, we want to increase that number by 500 employees for SA," says Wang Shunli.

LampSite (http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-204863-mwc.htm#.VFxqPvmUeQw) – basically a small cell, or indoor coverage solution  – and carrier aggregation (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137911:Vodacom-readies-network-for-true-4G), a technology that makes true 4G (LTE-Advanced) speeds possible.

Huawei intends launching its LampSite in SA soon, according to Cao Ming, VP of Huawei's carrier business for Eastern and Southern Africa. "The timeframe will depend on demand. We are mainly targeting the operators and small and medium enterprise." As for carrier aggregation, some of SA's telcos have successfully tested the technology (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138077) – including Vodacom and Telkom – although at this stage there is not a wide enough range of devices that support it, nor is the necessary spectrum (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137171:Spectrum-allocation-urgency-grows&catid=260) (mainly 2.6GHz) available.

In September, Huawei said (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137790) it was scoping the local market to the end of deploying its next-generation SDN tools – the Huawei Agile Network – in SA in the near future.

competing products (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=136852:Seven-sub-R1-000-smartphones&catid=260) in the sub-R1 000 category. "Huawei is positioned in the mid- to high-end." Sladek says this makes sense, given what he says is a "rising middle class" in SA.

Huawei is set to launch its latest flagship smartphone next Tuesday, at an event in Cape Town. While Hu is reticent around specifics, he says it is not the successor to Huawei's current top smartphone the Ascend P7, but will be in a "new segment" altogether.

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