In April 2018, Chi­nese multi­na­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy cor­po­ra­tion Huawei pre­dict­ed that the glob­al dig­i­tal econ­o­my would be worth US$23 tril­lion by the year 2025.

Ac­cord­ing to the Glob­al In­dus­try Vi­sion (GIV) re­port, Huawei stat­ed that by 2025 the num­ber of per­son­al smart de­vices would reach 40 bil­lion and the to­tal num­ber of con­nec­tions around the world would reach 100 bil­lion.

But then the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic hit.

And this ac­cel­er­at­ed the adop­tion of tech­nol­o­gy, Huawei’s re­gion­al mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy vice pres­i­dent Joaquin Sal­dana told the Busi­ness Guardian.

“We were ex­pect­ing US$23 tril­lion by 2025, with this we would reach that num­ber even soon­er,” Sal­dana said.

“We can see it be­cause the trans­for­ma­tion has been oc­cur­ring be­cause of the pan­dem­ic, now we are talk­ing e-com­merce, we are talk­ing about work­ing at home, ed­u­ca­tion at home, all of that is part of the dig­i­tal econ­o­my and al­so the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion,” he said.

Sal­dana was among hun­dreds of busi­ness lead­ers, tech lovers, and me­dia per­son­nel that con­verged on Can­cun, Mex­i­co, last week as Huawei host­ed its Latam ICT Con­gress 2022 at the JW Mar­riott.

It was the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s first in-per­son con­fer­ence in the re­gion in two years.

But even as things re­turn to nor­mal, Sal­dana be­lieves this would not have much of a neg­a­tive im­pact on Huawei.

“My per­son­al opin­ion is that we are in a tran­si­tion and I don’t think we will get back to the way things used to be, but on the oth­er hand I don’t think that we will keep work­ing from home and re­ly­ing 100 per cent on ICT. There is some­thing in be­tween clos­er to us­ing ICT as a ba­sis for every­thing but we are about to see what will be our new fu­ture,” Sal­dana said.

Huawei now op­er­ates re­gion­al­ly un­der Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean which was not the case pre­vi­ous­ly.

“We recog­nised that’s the way to go,” Huawei’s vice pres­i­dent of pub­lic af­fairs for LAC Ce­sar Fu­nes told the Busi­ness Guardian.

“We have a strong pres­ence in the re­gion in mul­ti­ple coun­tries. The name of our Of­fice for Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean is called the Mul­ti­coun­try of­fice,” Fu­nes stat­ed.

And Fu­nes said the re­gion is on the front burn­er for Huawei.

“Our busi­ness has been evolv­ing, our port­fo­lio is ex­pand­ing. We went from con­nec­tiv­i­ty, to ver­ti­cal in­dus­tries and Transso­lu­tions, smart de­vices, more re­cent­ly cloud ser­vices and re­al­ly re­cent­ly dig­i­tal pow­ered so­lu­tions and even­tu­al­ly every sin­gle busi­ness unit that we launch glob­al­ly we will launch in the re­gion for sure,” he said.

Fu­nes said dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is a dri­ver for eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery and growth.

“So our plan is to con­tin­ue in­te­grat­ing in­to each one of the coun­tries all of the busi­ness units that we have. We will con­tin­ue to de­vel­op dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture which in­cludes not on­ly build­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty with fi­bre net­works and 3G, 4G, 5G da­ta so­lu­tions but al­so da­ta cen­tres,” he said.

“We will con­tin­ue to of­fer so­lu­tions be­cause the new oil is da­ta so we need to have the abil­i­ty to trans­port the da­ta, store it and process the da­ta for the ap­pli­ca­tions in the cloud,” Fu­nes said.

Since May 2019, Huawei has been un­der fire from the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment, re­sult­ing in what is col­lo­qui­al­ly re­ferred to as the “Huawei ban.”

But even de­spite this on­go­ing bat­tle Huawei says it will sur­vive.

“It is not a se­cret that this (sit­u­a­tion with the US) is hap­pen­ing. Our com­mit­ment is to the re­gion and our com­mit­ment is to the coun­tries in which we op­er­ate,” Fu­nes said.

“We will con­tin­ue to look for al­ter­na­tives, to look for our so­lu­tions based on fol­low­ing all the re­quire­ments all the rules in every coun­try around the world, so we will con­tin­ue to do that,” he said.

Be­fore the ban, Huawei was ex­pect­ed to be­come the world’s largest smart­phone man­u­fac­tur­er by the end of 2019.

“Those re­stric­tions im­pact­ed many of the de­vices, specif­i­cal­ly the smart phone busi­ness, all oth­er busi­ness units in gen­er­al have had a steady growth,” Fu­nes said.

“We are al­ways adapt­ing to what­ev­er cir­cum­stances we have in front of us ,” he said.

Fu­nes said Huawei’s fu­ture re­mains bright.

Huawei host­ed the Latam ICT Con­gress 2022, sup­port­ed by GS­MA In­tel­li­gence and ITU, aim­ing to build a glob­al in­dus­try com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form and pro­mote the rapid de­vel­op­ment of 5G and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Dur­ing the con­gress, Huawei’s 5G Prod­uct Line Vice Pres­i­dent Fang Xi­ang de­liv­ered a keynote speech ti­tled In­no­va­tion for a Gold­en Decade of 5G in LATAM, where he said, “sim­pli­fied and green 5G net­works that de­liv­er a cross-gen­er­a­tion ex­pe­ri­ence are fun­da­men­tal to 5G busi­ness suc­cess. Huawei is com­mit­ted to bring­ing ul­tra-wide­band and mul­ti-an­ten­na tech­nolo­gies to every fre­quen­cy band and sce­nario through con­tin­u­ous 5G in­no­va­tion, to build a ubiq­ui­tous, sim­pli­fied, and high-ca­pac­i­ty tar­get net­work and ush­er in a gold­en decade of 5G in Latin Amer­i­ca.”

5G de­vel­op­ment is ac­cel­er­at­ing in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Over the past two years, many coun­tries in­clud­ing Brazil, Mex­i­co, Chile, and Pe­ru have al­ready be­gun com­mer­cial 5G de­ploy­ment.

Dur­ing this roll­out, many op­er­a­tors have al­so be­gun ex­plor­ing new mod­els for 5G pack­ages, and new ser­vices for in­di­vid­ual con­sumers, fam­i­lies, and in­dus­tries to max­imise dig­i­tal div­i­dends.

In its ex­hi­bi­tion hall, Huawei showed some of the tech­nol­o­gy it has de­vel­oped over the years in­clud­ing ul­tra-wide­band and mul­ti-an­ten­na tech­nolo­gies.

Ac­cord­ing to Huawei this has cre­at­ed new chal­lenges for the in­dus­try to face though, as Fang ex­plained: “As the pace of 5G spec­trum dis­tri­b­u­tion varies across coun­tries and the TDD and FDD spec­trums have dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics, op­er­a­tors face dif­fer­ent chal­lenges in 5G net­work con­struc­tion. How­ev­er, all op­er­a­tors share the same goal: to move to­wards one net­work on mul­ti­ple TDD and FDD bands and build sim­pli­fied and green net­works that de­liv­er a cross-gen­er­a­tion ex­pe­ri­ence.”