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| Edited By: Beryl Menezes |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 18, 2018, 05:25 AM IST
Eric Yu, president, Enterprise Business, Huawei Indiam, spoke to Beryl Menezes about the company’s plans to double investment in the enterprise segment in India, which it sees as a very attractive, albeit a competitive market. Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Can you elaborate on your plans for the Indian BWA market?
A: We have tied up with Airtel for their Bangalore 4G launch, which is expected within the next two weeks. We are in talks with all other BWA operators to help roll out their 4G networks.
Q: What kind of revenues are you expecting from the Indian market, especially with respect to the enterprise business?
A: Our overall business in India amounts to about $300 million, which includes handsets, data cards and set-top boxes. Of this, the handset business contributes $100 million. The enterprise business, launched in India last year, makes up 5% of our total revenues from the country. We plan to clock $200 million in 2012 from our enterprise business in India. Globally, the target is to reach $15 billion in enterprise business revenues by 2015, from the $4 billion now.
Q: How is your handset business doing?
A: We are launching a new 3G-enabled handset - Huawei Ascend — this month in China, which will have a quad core processor CPU for much greater speed. It will be launched in India later this year.
Q: How much scope do you see for the cloud market here?
A: Cloud will take at least two years to catch up in India. However, we have tied up with many large enterprises for public cloud and have partnerships with local cloud service providers to provide cloud services to SMBs. However, we believe the future will be hybrid cloud, and we are ready with that offering as well.
Q: What is your strategy for the enterprise segment?
A: We plan to engage 200-300 top customers in India, including the government and large enterprises, for multiple solutions that we offer, including network solutions, unified communications, IT solutions, industry solutions and other services.
Q: For which services do you see biggest demand in India?
A: We see the most demand for network solutions in India, followed by video and telepresence, server storage and data centres. We saw $40 million order bookings last year for the enterprise business, and this year we are targeting $150 million in order bookings.
Q: Any plans to increase your investments?
A: Huawei India has an R&D centre in Bangalore hosting 2,700 employees. Huawei is also building a second R&D centre in Whitefield, Bangalore, which will be ready next year. This centre can accommodate 4,000 employees, pointing to doubling of our India investment.
Q: What major challenges do you see in the Indian market?
A: Some of the major challenges in India are low information and communications technology growth despite a variety of equipment available, various strong system integrators and keen competition between OEMs. To combat this, we have several new innovations such as virtual teller machines for banks, which can help in financial inclusion, solutions for enhanced network connectivity and surveillance solutions for safety of the city.
