Huawei Technologies plans to grow enterprise products business in India

KOLKATA: China’s biggest telecom gear maker Huawei Technologies plans to grow its enterprise products business in emerging markets like India amid continuing market expansion challenges on this count in the US, and is also exploring local manufacturing options, a top company executive told ET.

“India offers a far bigger business potential for growing our enterprise products business than the US and Huawei will leverage its existing relationships with the country’s biggest conglomerates like Reliance, Bharti, Tatas and the Aditya Birla Group to focus on six key verticals, where we accept demand for our storage systems and servers in coming months,” Derek Hao, Vice President, Huawei (Enterprise Business Group, South East Asia) told ET.

Hao said Shenzhen-based Huawei’s global board had last month held “exploratory level talks” on the pros and cons of locally manufacturing enterprise business products in India in the run-up to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu’s recent visit to Huawei’s R&D facility in China, but clarified that “there was no firm decision yet”.

In the immediate term, Huawei’s Indian unit, he said, would target its enterprise business solutions at six key verticals, including “education, media, internet service providers (ISPs), BFS&I (banking, financial services & insurance), oil & gas and government sector”.

He added that the ISP business would be a specific focus zone where Huawei would push its enterprise business products to a mix of over-the-top (OTT) content players, data centre operators, wireless and wired broadband operators.