HUAWEI REAFFIRMS COMMITMENT TO EUROPE

by N. Peter Kramer

The new Exhibition Center not only underscores the fact that Huawei is a fast-growing and innovative company in the Enterprise market, the opening of the Exhibition Center in Amstelveen highlights Huawei’s commitment to Europe.

During a meeting with ICT journalists in Stockholm, Huawei reaffirmed its commitment to the European market and to growing its investment in its European research and development operations during 2013 and beyond. The meeting took place in Huawei’s first R&D laboratory when it opened in 2000, since then 14 R&D sites have been developed across Europe - in Sweden, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and most recently in Finland, Ireland and Belgium. The company’s goals for investment in Europe is to help meet the evolving business needs of its customers, to help address the European Union’s strategic goals for ICT and to continue to grow its revenue in Europe and worldwide. Renato Lombardi, vice president of Huawei’s European Research Centre, said that “Huawei is committed to reinvesting a minimum of 10% of revenue in research and development every year” and continued “In 2012, we re-invested over 13% of our global revenue in R&D, one of the largest single commitments to R&D in the ICT industry by a private company. Our investment in R&D in Europe also continues to grow.

It doubled between 2010 and 2013 and we expect it will double again over the next five years.” The company employs more than 790 R&D specialists across these 14 European sites. Huawei’s European development spans ICT hardware and software, microprocessing, optical data transmission and wireless networks.

Kevan Watts, a member of Huawei’s International Advisory Committee and deputy chairman of HSBC, said: “Huawei has identified Europe as its core strategic marketplace and is investing in Europe to realise this goal.” Huawei’s success in Europe will be measured by its ability to help enterprises and channel partners successfully navigate the current major IT challenges and opportunities, which include increasing mobility of employees, customers and applications, the deepening role of cloud computing, the real-world utilization of big data, and the impact of social media on the success of enterprises. In order to be successful, the company is committed to working closely with its local European partners to meet the unique needs of customers in each distinct European market it serves.

Jim Lu, President of Huawei CEE & Nordic Region, explained “Our priorities include helping our telecoms and enterprise customers to manage the rising volumes of data that are now flooding their networks, reducing the energy consumption of the components that make up those networks and ensuring that our customers will have access to the most advanced and efficient technologies to support fixed and mobile traffic growth controlled by the most advanced software management.”

Lombardi: “As Huawei expanded its sales operations internationally at the turn of the new millennium, it chose, like many other enterprises, to implement a distributed innovation strategy. This led to the creation of R&D facilities in multiple geographies around the world, each with a specific innovation focus. The majority of Huawei’s R&D sites were located in established innovation clusters or centres of excellence. These decisions were driven by a number of requirements. First, Europe is important for the presence of the main global customers. The second was to place research operations in locations that offered an existing ecosystem, a collection of skilled talent and existing linkages with universities and research institutes and infrastructure. This led to the location of R&D sites here in northern Europe where clusters had been established in mobile network and base station technology development as well as mobile device design. For the same reasons, optoelectronic research operations were located in Italy, in Germany and in the UK.” Lombardi added that as convergence across the ICT industry progresses, the teams in these distributed, technology-specific locations work more closely together.

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