Huawei eyes partners to drive growth in East Africa
Huawei plans to open more data centers in Kenya as part of a broader expansion of its cloud services
KENYA (Reuters) - Chinese tech giant, Huawei signaled its intention to drive advanced technology deeper into the East African market at the annual Huawei partner summit held in Nairobi on Wednesday.
Huawei announced it will continue its partnership with Redington, the leading distributor of technology in Africa and the Middle East, to drive advanced technology deeper into the East African market.
In 2018, the Chinese company signed a distribution agreement with Redington in Kenya. With over 3,000 distributors spread across Africa, Redington is to spread Huawei s advanced Information Technology products across the region. This is geared towards accelerating the ICT (information and communications technology) development in East Africa.
"During this cooperation I think our local partners help us to better understand what s the real requirements from the end users and also we continue to transfer the technology to the Kenya partners. So we invite a lot of partners, we join together to exchange ideas and also we share what s the challenges from each other," said Stone He, the CEO of Huawei Kenya.
The summit comes at a time when businesses across the globe are beginning to feel the effects of what is widely regarded as the fourth industrial revolution, with companies looking to ICT for solutions to local problems.
In Kenya, the government has undertaken an ambitious development agenda, prioritizing affordable health care, housing, food security and manufacturing.
"We will see more inroads into private sector, in technology, in places like banks, telcos, government sectors and other large corporates. And we will see them in other areas as well. For example we do health cares and we see IOT (Internet of Things) being a new play as well as telemedicine. Huawei has a number of large solutions, for example smart cities and we will see ourselves working with them to develop and partner in developing and implementing these large projects," said Hassan Poppat, CEO of Computech Limited, one of the companies looking to partner with Huawei to advance ICT solutions in the region.
Huawei also plans to open more data centers in Kenya as part of a broader expansion of its cloud services on the continent.
