Sevana: Huawei sees small cell opportunity in Middle East

Friday, October 2, 2015

Huawei sees small cell opportunity in Middle East

The Chinese firm also targets LTE-A projects in the region

Chinese ICT firm Huawei is seeing significant growth opportunities in the Middle East region with small cells projects, the company’s Vice President of International Media Affairs for EMEA Ronald Sladek told RCR Wireless News.

“Many operators within the region are already active in small cell activities and are currently in the planning and deployment stages. Currently the most common deployment scenario is indoor, but with increasing capacity and coverage requirements, both indoor and outdoor scenarios will be equally vital in future,” the executive said.

“So far Huawei has worked on more than 180 small cell contracts worldwide, many of which have been in the Middle East. It will remain an important part of our portfolio in the coming years,” Sladek added.

According to the executive, Huawei has worked on approximately 17 commercial networks across the company’s Middle East business unit.

“Huawei has been working closely with leading operators [in the Middle East region]to carry out trials and tests on future LTE networks, particularly LTE-Advanced, 4.5G and 5G,” he said. Sladek also said the Chinese company is starting to work with LTE-Advanced networks in countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait

The EMEA region represented 35% of the company’s overall revenues last year. This figure represented an increase of approximately 20% versus the previous year.

“For many years the Middle East in particular has been a driver of that growth. The region is one of the fastest growing markets for Huawei,” the executive said. “In the last year alone we have seen incredible initiatives undertaken to move towards a more agile software-defined future, to develop new platforms and infrastructure-as-a-service, and to bolster information sharing between businesses, governments, and the telco sector. This digital transformation has been widely supported through ambitious national development agendas across the Middle East,” he added.

Sladek also said that Huawei is seeing increasing ICT initiatives across all markets in the Middle East but mentioned the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia as the most mature markets in terms of ICT developments.

Within the Middle East, Huawei currently has offices across 10 countries with around 5,000 employees—of whom over 66% are local hires.

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