By Benjamin Hou, President of Huawei Northern Africa Carrier Business Department
Huawei Northern Africa OTF 2022 was successfully hosted in Morocco on 21-22 July, with the theme of "Accelerating Digital Services and Digital Operations Transformation to Enable Business Success". Carriers, industry organizations, industry partners, and analysts came together in Casablanca to discuss approaches to digital transformation and the best strategies for delivering real business value.
A wave of digital transformation is sweeping across industry. Digital infrastructure based on 5G, cloud computing, big data, AI, and security has created a solid base for the development of the global digital economy. As a core provider of global digital infrastructure, the telecom industry has already enabled a digital economy with a GDP more than 40 times its own size. Moreover, with the support of digital infrastructure, the boundary between the traditional economy, dominated by vertical industries, and the digital economy is gradually disappearing, leading towards full industry digitalization.
The digital transformation of carriers now has sufficient momentum to move from inside to outside, making them well placed to address the huge space and opportunities inherent in the digitalization of wider industry. To accelerate sharing the industry's digital dividends, Huawei is pleased to work with carriers, industry organizations and partners to pursue complementary capabilities, collaborative innovation, and value creation for industry customers
Huawei is also cooperating with the TM Forum, an industry organization, and many partner carriers to define the target architecture of autonomous networks. Successfully implementing autonomous networks requires digital operation transformation of three key areas: digital network and IT resources, O&M operations, and end-user-oriented business operations. In addition, culture, organization, talent and skills must also be addressed. Through innovative digital technologies such as cross-domain autonomous closed-loop operations with hierarchical capability deconstruction, Huawei is able to greatly simplify operation services, making it easier to achieve zero-wait, zero-touch, and zero-trouble user experience. This is helping telecom carriers to seize new market opportunities and implement exciting new business models.
Over the past 30 years, Huawei has focused on the planning, construction, maintenance, optimization, and operation of carrier networks and has become the largest professional service and equipment provider in the telecom industry. Today, we remain as committed as ever to providing professional and reliable services for our carrier customers, helping them achieve high-quality networks, efficient delivery, optimal experience, and reliable maintenance.
At the same time, Huawei attaches great importance to its own digital transformation. Our philosophy is to change ourselves before serving customers. With the gradual improvement of our digital platform and process system, we can now use the AI-based remote acceptance and intelligent operation on the ISDP delivery platform to achieve secure and efficient site construction. Our cloud-based NOC solution supports global network O&M and we offer various complementary digital solutions to support carrier business development. For example, in North Africa in 2021, our AUTIN intelligent O&M solution helped more than 20 carrier networks improve their O&M efficiency and deliver stable operation of their networks. While our SmartCare solution is helping 12 carriers in the region optimize service quality and customer experience, as well as enabling data-driven operations and decision-making. In addition, our digital best network solution has helped 13 customer networks rank No. 1 in P3 crowd-testing.
The most difficult yet most important factor in digital transformation is the transformation of culture, talent, and ways of working. Huawei has cooperated with more than 600 universities in 28 countries in Africa to provide professional ICT training, and helped carriers build adaptable organizational culture and skill models. More than 300,000 associates have been trained, effectively supporting customers' transformation.
In addition, Huawei is cooperating with carriers to develop digital services such as Fintech and VAS to help customers obtain new business value. We are committed to providing secure, convenient, and inclusive financial services to 160 million users in this market. For example, our Fintech solution has helped Ethiopia Telecom develop its digital wallet service, whose growth of 17 million users in 10 months has been recognized as the fastest in the world.
And finally, this year, Huawei has established the North Africa Operation Transformation Center to provide advisory, enablement and co-creation services to regional carriers. By offering support with both scenario selection and subsequent rapid expansion, our aim is to unleash the power of digital operation transformation to help regional carriers achieve continuous business success.