Huawei sees significant potential to support Pakistan’s journey to a digital economy

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Executive underlines the company’s commitment to Pakistan’s ICT ecosystem, talent development, and supporting digitalization in line with Digital Pakistan
Our Correspondent
Karachi
On the sidelines of the SAMENA Leaders’ Summit, the President of Huawei Middle East, Charles Yang, has provided an update on the company’s business globally and across local markets, with his comments following Huawei’s release of its annual earnings results for 2020. The executive has emphasized the strategic importance of the region to the company internationally, noting Huawei’s commitment to the region, and that there are significant opportunities to enable more aggressive digital transformation in support of national development visions and targets, as well as to grow its market presence.
In particular, Yang acknowledged that Pakistan is one of the fastest growing and maturing ICT markets in the region today. Huawei is thus collaborating with public and private sector entities, educators, and technology companies to expand the ICT ecosystem, while building more Huawei ICT Academies to meet the goals of national visions such as Digital Pakistan.
“Digitization in the region has accelerated remarkably over the last year, with global network traffic having increased by around 50% during the pandemic,” notes Yang. “The ICT industry thus has an important responsibility to create new social and business value for governments, organizations, and individuals. We are fully committed to this value creation. We already bring the power of technologies like 5G to key events such as the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, and are now aligning with governments to support mega-events like Expo 2020 in the UAE and the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. We will keep innovating to create value for our customers and to support economic recovery and social progress.”
To that end, Huawei has said that it used the last year to further enhance its operations despite a challenging global environment. That led to achieving revenue and profit growth during 2020 overall. Part of that came down to an unwavering focus on R&D and joint innovation programs in areas like 5G, AI, and cloud, says Yang, with Huawei establishing 13 Open Labs around the world to support open collaboration for shared success.
In particular, global 5G deployments have proceeded faster than expected. By the end of 2020, more than 140 commercial 5G networks had been deployed in 59 countries and regions, and the number of 5G subscribers worldwide had exceeded 220 million.
Globally, the number of 5G networks and base stations of the first year is 6 times more than 4G, and user growth of 5G is 500 times faster. Middle East has become a leading 5G region globally. In just 19 months, the number of 5G users have exceeded 2 million which 4G took double times, and it is expected that 5G user grow very fast.
That’s why Regulators in the region have released many policies which greatly promote 5G development, yet Yang says that more industry policies are still needed to unleash 5G’s full potential.