Huawei’s cloud services arm announced plans to expand into two new international regions on Monday. Indonesia and Ireland will soon be covered by Huawei Cloud, the unit’s CEO Zhang Ping’an announced at the company’s Connect 2022 event in Bangkok.
Why it matters: Huawei Cloud has grown to become the second largest cloud service provider in China in the second quarter of 2022 by spending, according to Canalys. As Huawei has encountered setbacks with its attempted expansion into the US and some European countries, exploring alternative overseas markets could be a major opportunity for new growth for the Chinese telecoms giant.
Details: Huawei Cloud launched its “Go Cloud, Go Global” plan on Monday, which will focus on Everything as a Service (XaaS) and look to expand Huawei’s international footprint.
- Huawei Cloud will cover over 170 countries and regions by the end of this year, according to the firm.
- The company said it will build “one global network” and that its service will be accessible within 50 milliseconds globally.
- Huawei called for governments and enterprises to work more closely to build local digital ecosystems by strengthening the talent pool and supporting startups.
- The event also saw the company claim that they will support over 10,000 startups globally in the next three years by helping optimize costs and providing technical support, entrepreneurship training, and other business resources. More than 120 enterprises in the Asia Pacific region have already joined the Huawei Cloud Startup Program.
Context: The Global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market is currently dominated by Amazon and Microsoft, with the two controlling 60% of the market by revenue in 2021, according to Gartner, a US consultancy. Huawei ranked fifth according to the same data, with a 4.6% market share and $4.19 billion in revenue in 2021.
- The second quarter of 2022 saw Huawei take 19% of China’s total market share by spending in the sector, second only to Alibaba Cloud’s 34%, according to Canalys.