Demonetisation a big opportunity for Huawei

While businesses across the country are reporting a slide in revenue due to demonetisation, Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group is thriving at the back of customers such as Paytm and fintech companies.

“With the demonetisation move by the Indian government, we have inched closer towards an economy that is based on digital computing technologies.

“New ICT technologies in the digitalisation era are also optimising business models and opening up new market opportunities. We are also the main IT infrastructure supplier to Paytm, which is one of the biggest alternative payment solutions,” Derek Hao, President (Enterprise Business Group), Huawei India, told BusinessLine while explaining how demonetisation has come as a blessing in disguise for the Chinese firm.

Paytm has seen a huge spike in transaction since the announcement of demonestisation last month . In the last one month, the company has got 1.4 crore new users and three times rise in both transaction value and volume.

Hao said this huge spike in traffic towards Paytm has led to an increased demand for IT infrastructure, boosting Huawei’s business with Paytm.

After seeing such growth with just one player, Huawei is now launching a cloud-based banking solution in partnership with Infosys Finacle called Finacle FusionCloud to target new-age banks and fintech companies.

“The highly available platform will allow customers to run Finacle suite of applications on a private cloud network, delivering considerable performance, maintenance and total cost of ownership advantages,” Hao said.

The solution was co-developed by Infosys and Huawei. Similar co-development agreements could soon be seen with other large Indian IT services companies such as TCS, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, Hao signalled.

“We are always on the lookout for such partnerships. Like TCS, Infosys, Honeywell, SAP, are to participate at the Enterprise ICT Summit 2016 in Mumbai and this reiterates that we are looking to broaden and develop relationships with IT companies in India,” Hao said. Apart from banking, Huawei Enterprise Group, which clocked revenues of about $4.5 billion in 2015, is expanding in areas such as smart cities and smart grids in India, an area where its biggest competitor Cisco has already signed multiple contracts with various State governments. “My focus for the government is around Smart Cities and Digital India, Smart Grid for Power and Utilities, Smart transportation for the transportation verticals, and the BFSI sector. My partnerships follow these strategies,” Hao said.

India is one of the fastest growing markets for Huawei Enterprise Group, growing at over 50 per cent annually. Hao said he expects growth to continue despite slowdown in IT spending worldwide.

“I feel that the slowdown is in the conventional IT industry. Customers are still willing to invest in upcoming trends like Big Data, Mobility, Internet of Things and we feel that this will lead to continuous growth in the industry. Due to Huawei’s robust product solution strategy, we are able to catch on to trends such as these, and provide our customers with the most advanced of solutions,” Hao said.

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