Huawei doubles down on cloud services in Asia as smartphone business takes battering from US sanctions
- Senior executives have expressed optimism about Huawei’s business prospects in the region as major economies there accelerate digital transformation
- Huawei has three proprietary data centers in Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong respectively and a cooperative data centre in Malaysia
Huawei Technologies Co is doubling down on its cloud services in Southeast Asia, launching a new “availability zone” in Thailand as the Chinese telecoms giant pivots to businesses less dependent on semiconductors.
Senior executives have expressed optimism about Huawei’s business prospects in the region as major economies there accelerate digital transformation, driving demand for cloud services. An availability zone consists of one or more data centers that can be treated as a single entity, with zones in a region interconnected with high-bandwidth and low-latency networking.
“Our [consumer-facing] devices business in Asia-Pacific was affected mainly due to US sanctions, but we have managed to maintain a stable telecoms business there,” said Jay Chen, vice-president of Huawei’s Asia-Pacific operations, in an interview on Thursday.
In addition to two existing availability zones in Huawei’s Thailand data centre, the third zone was announced during a Huawei cloud event on Wednesday in Bangkok. General Prawit Wongsuwon, Thailand’s deputy prime minister, opened the event and said Huawei’s expansion plans in the country aligned with the government’s policies for digital development.
The new zone is expected to benefit customers such as financial institutions and government organizations, said Zeng Xingyun, president of Huawei Cloud operations for Asia-Pacific. Zeng downplayed competition with other cloud service providers, such as Google and Amazon, saying the market is still in its early commercial stages and “the pie is big enough for everyone to have a slice”.
