Huawei Technologies has expressed its commitment towards building a fully digital IT ecosystem in Nigeria as well as its research and development in investments to pursue sustainability into the future.

The Deputy Managing Director (DMD), Huawei Technologies Enterprise, Ken Zhao stated this during the just concluded Chief Information Officers (CIO) Awards 2021 which held in Lagos recently.

Zhao stated that the CIO Awards is a forum to celebrate excellence, innovation and amassed service delivery across the user landscape and added that through events like this, Nigeria’s innovations can be celebrated in which its CIOs can be encouraged to do more.

He noted that the company’s strategy is focused on working with various industries to add value to ICTs and provide world class ICT solutions while adding that by doing so the value is added to the Nigerian economy which is the tech firm’s way of contributing to the ICT sector.

According to him, investment in ICT helps the industry digitise and enable the economy to increase their order of production.

“Digital development relies on digital technology and for digital technology to stay relevant, we must continue to be innovative and create value in Cloud, AI and network which are the three critical arms of technology,” he said.

Also speaking at the event, the Chairman, CIO Awards Jury and Executive Director, IT and Operations of Access Bank Plc., Ade Bajomo, said Africa has started solving its problems and it is exciting as the continent has leveraged on global partnership.

“This year alone, about $1.5 billion has flown into Fintechs in Africa in which Nigeria took a third of that and there are at least 23 undisclosed transactions in that and I think that there is no better time than to celebrate our CIOs who have been doing fantastic and wonderful things.

“This is just a start and if we are going to solve real problems, whether it is in financial technology, social services, government, whatever we want to solve is going to be solved leveraging technology,” Bajomo said.

While revealing that the firm joined the global fight against COVID-19, Zhao noted that Hauwei was working with partners and research institutions to provide AI assisted diagnosis and other services across Asia, Europe and Latin America.

“As a leading global ICT infrastructure and smart service provider, we remain committed to bringing digital to every person, home, organisation as we provide customers with competitive, secure, reliable and end to end products and portfolios.

“Currently, we have more than 197,000 employees and 50 per cent of them are from the researched and development departments. We are operating in more than 170 countries/regions. We rose from 49 to 44 places in the global fortune 500 in 2021.

“We will continue to rub off our research and development in investments to pursue sustainability into the future. Our development and research in investment spending in 2020 reached around $22 billion which is around 50 per cent over that period,” Zhao said.

He went further to mention other innovative projects which Huawei has embarked on in Nigeria such as “Hyper Converged Infrastructure to DPR, Wi-Fi 6 to Lagos State Government, etc.”

“We have also formulated a roadmap on how to develop technical and digital skills in Nigeria, working with more than 65 universities by providing Huawei Academies. Under different initiatives in Nigeria, we have facilitated ICT training for 1000 government staff, 2000 youths and 1000 girls basic ICT training,” he added.