Kathy Gibson reports from Pinnacle TechScape – Partnering is key for Huawei Enterprise as it grows its business in South Africa.
Kevin Zhang, chief marketing officer of Huawei ICT infrastructure, reiterates that the vendor works only through resellers in the enterprise space.
The enterprise business covers networking, computing, cloud and digital power.
Zhang points out that Huawei invests 21,8% of its revenue into R&D, which amounted to $28,6-billion in 2025.
Having been founded in 1987, Huawei currently has 165 000 active patents, with more than 260 patent license agreements as at the end of 2025.
In South Africa, Huawei looks after the biggest customers like telcos and utilities
In the commercial market, it partners to reach the approximately 1-million customers around the world. These include universities, hospitals, factories and hotels.
The distribution business engages with resellers to address the approximately 10-million addressable SMEs around the world.
Huawei’s go-to-market strategy addresses specific industry verticals with tailored solutions. These verticals include ISP ,finance, government, electric power, manufacturing, retail, education, healthcare and mining.
The four solution domains are data centre, campus, digital site and wide area networking.
At the product level, cloud and public cloud are offered; as well as computing, datacom, optical, storage and intelligent collaboration products.
Professional services that support the products include consulting and planning deployment and integration, maintenance and assisted operations, training and certification.
No discussion in the IT industry is complete without talking about artificial intelligence – and Huawei has some strong opinions in this regard.
Zhang believes AI is reshaping the economic paradigm and fuelling the growth of the intelligent economy.
New AI solutions demand a new intelligent foundation based on devices, agentic Internet and new compute architecture.
The big question for partners is how to leverage the AI economy to create new business opportunities.
One such system that partners can use is Huawei’s NetMaster, an AI-powered network foundation model and agent designed to automate complex network operations and maintenance (O&M).
NetMaster has been launched in China, and will be available in South Africa towards the end of this year.
The system is free for partners, and they can build services on top of it to address customers’ specific needs.
Huawei additionally supports partes with competitive pricing, longer quotation validity and faster predictable delivery.