Huawei claims 50 5G commercial contracts worldwide

At its Asia-Pacific Innovation Day Huawei announced it has now signed 50 commercial 5G contracts globally and shipped 200,000 5G modules.

Huawei loves to host its own commercial events, at which it can control the message and invite partners to come on stage and talk about how great it is to work with Huawei. This kind of event is more important than ever for the company now that it’s fighting a running PR battle with the US government and strives to convince everyone else not to abandon it.

While US allies such as Australia and Korea feel compelled to largely go along with whatever sanctions the US imposes on Huawei, the rest of the APAC region is crucial to its fortunes. Obviously China will always support it, but very populous countries such as India and Indonesia are of crucial strategic significance and have to obvious reason to pick a team in the US/China trade war.

Huawei positions these events as general telecoms get-togethers that it’s happy to host and pay for out of a desire to help everyone progress. It therefore keeps the more aggressive corporate propaganda under wraps most of the time and largely contents itself with nebulous aspirational pronouncements about the potential of technology and the importance of cooperation among the global telecoms community.

“5G is arriving at the right time,” said William Xu, Huawei Director of the Board and President of the Institute of Strategic Research. “More specifically, 5G can provide wide coverage, large bandwidth, and low latency on the basis of traditional connections. It can also provide slicing for different applications. This new feature makes it adaptable to a variety of complex industrial applications. With the advancement of 5G, there will be many 5G-enabled applications that will change the world. At the same time, 5G, AI, IoT and cloud are improving everyday life and nature, making the world a better place.”

Having said that, he was still keen to stress how well Huawei, specifically, is doing in this drive to make the world a better place. Those 50 (unspecified) deal wins compare with 42 Announced by Nokia in June, with 22 of them named, and 24 named 5G contracts published by Ericsson. So it seems to be broadly level-pegging between the three networking giants and, while Huawei doesn’t appear to have been crippled by the US hostility, it’s reasonable to speculate it would have a significant lead over its rivals under normal circumstances.