Mobile broadband is becoming a key telecoms industry focus in the Middle East, as more and more investments are made into building mobile broadband infrastructures, according to Bob Cai, Vice President, Wireless Marketing Department, Huawei, who spoke to CNME yesterday.
Cai explained that, from a vendor perspective, this would lead to impressive growth for Huawei’s network and telecoms business in the region. Out of 15 recent telecoms deployments in the Middle East, Huawei has been heavily involved in 11 of them, he said.
“We see a lot of opportunity here. You can see at GITEX a lot of different applications and services in vertical markets. We believe that, by 2020, operator revenue is going to double from today – it’s going to be worth up to $2 trillion,” he said.
Cai said that operators such as du and Etisalat in the UAE, and Oreedoo in Qatar, were already showing strong growth, thanks to the growing demand for data-centric services. These operators were showing great foresight in adapting to market demands for data services, he said, and that the growth in 3G and 4G services was only going to mean higher revenues.
“Some of them have even more than 10 percent revenue growth, and that’s very good,” he said.
Indeed, telecoms-related services in the Middle East looks so promising, Cai explained, that Huawei now believes the region has some of the biggest potential to be found anywhere in the world. He said that events like GITEX showed that there was a real hunger for taking wireless services to the next level.
“With 3G and LTE adoption growth, we’re really starting to see great revenue growth. This year, in the first half of the year, compared with last year, we’ve seen more than 10 percent growth because of the investment in mobile broadband. I think that mobile broadband is the industry focus,” he said.
