By Abel Deng, CEO, Huawei Technologies (Thailand) Co., Ltd.
Digital Economy accelerates global growth
Digital economy represents the new growth engine for markets worldwide. According to global studies, a 20% increment in digital economy can bring up to 1% GDP increase. Estimated to be 2.5 times faster than traditional economy, with ICT investment able to offer a 6.7 times return of the non-ICT investment, digital economy helps generate higher business value and growth across all sectors. Over 164 countries have published their national digital strategy, a roadmap towards implementing a strong foundation for a key driver of the economy.
In Thailand, we have seen tremendous progress in the growth of digital economy, starting from Thailand 4.0 policy, reflecting the country’s strong ambition to become a regional digital leader.
Huawei remains committed to support Thailand embrace its potential to become ASEAN’s Regional Digital Hub
While we are confident that Thailand will fully embrace its potential to become a regional digital hub, due to the country’s tremendous success in implementing cloud, AI, and 5G and driving the necessary skills in a digital economy, we aim to continue to support Thailand’s growth to digital economy through helping build centers of excellence in four areas, which are Connectivity excellence hub, Cloud excellence hub, Digital ecosystem excellence hub, and Digital talent hub.
Firstly, by investing further in an advanced network infrastructure to build the regional network. As a major 5G solution supplier in Thailand, Huawei has invested more than 800 engineers to support Thailand in building ASEAN's leading network.
Secondly, by ensuring Thailand is the preferred data center hub location. We have invested in local data centers based in Thailand since 2018 to ensure the best speed and data security, alongside superior customer service. Furthermore, we are extremely excited that our investment in local data centers will continue in 2021, due to the increasing strong demand for secure local services, to support the country’s digital development. We are investing therefore an additional TBD 700m in what will become Huawei’s third data center located in Thailand. This important investment shows just how crucial Thailand is to Huawei’s strategy and underlines the country’s determination to leap forward with its digital economy.
Thirdly, by building industry and innovation centers to become the go-to country for creating digital ecosystems. For ecosystem, Huawei has invested in several projects in Thailand, including an innovation Openlab in 2016 and 5G innovative centre worth $15 million at the Digital Economy Promotion Agency earlier this year.
And critically, driving education and upskilling of Thais through initiatives such as Huawei Academy.
The convergence of connectivity and computing to help digital economy thrive
The convergence of connectivity and computing will change all industries: from transportation, to finance, energy or education, and help create new value for society. Thailand's ecosystem must equally value connectivity and power to drive digital growth across all industries and create strong economic value for the country and its people.
Thailand is at the starting line of the new round of digital economy, a strong position for the coming ICT evolution. We believe the next 10 years will define Thailand 4.0, as technologies such as 5G, Cloud, Edge Computing and AI are continually adopted into the operations of almost every industry. With leading infrastructure and business maturity, we are confident Thailand can achieve a growth of its digital economy to over 30% of overall GDP and become the region's Digital Hub, and Huawei Thailand is absolutely committed to driving this growth.
Huawei is committed to support creating an intelligent Thailand, to help the country leap forward with its digital transformation and become the region’s digital hub. Fulfilling Huawei’s vision of ‘Bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world’.
