Huawei launches $40M S’pore centre
Chinese phone maker Huawei on February 23 launched a $40 million regional centre in Singapore – its first in the Asia-Pacific – that lets developers test apps and services for its mobile devices.
The centre, dubbed a “DigiX Lab”, will provide online and
offline consultation for developers, and hands-on support in app development
using augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI), software to
port apps to Huawei devices, and other technologies.
The launch comes amid a US ban on Huawei since May 2019 that
limits its ability to use US tech giant Google’s services and apps, like the
Google Play app store, for its products. This prompted the Chinese firm to
further develop its own version called Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).
And despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Huawei also expanded its
HMS team in Singapore by threefold in the last year, which includes operations,
marketing and technical staff to support Singapore app developers.
The company said the lab in Changi Business Park “leverages
Singapore’s importance as a growing technological hub in the Asia-Pacific” to
boost the mobile ecosystem throughout the region.
Huawei Consumer Cloud Service Asia-Pacific director Shan
Xuefeng said: “In the era of 5G, Huawei aims to build [a connected world] with
HMS that empowers developers to innovate as they build their business.”
HMS has been around for years and has its own app store
called AppGallery that was launched in China in 2011 and globally in 2018.
The Singapore DigiX Lab is Huawei’s second one in the world.
The first was launched in Germany and six others are in the pipeline, said the
company.
The Singapore lab serves markets with the most registered
Huawei developers in the Asia-Pacific, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand,
the Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong.
Huawei will spend $40 million on the lab over two to three
years.
It spans 289sqm, or slightly larger than three four-room
Housing Board flats, and has space for 70 people.
Huawei’s experts staffing it will provide technical support
and services for developers facing problems when developing apps for HMS.
Training, workshops and networking events will also be held
in the lab to grow the local developer community.
There have been concerns that being shut out of Google apps
and services would mean much fewer apps for Huawei phones. But the company said
it has grown the number of apps for HMS, with more than 120,000 apps as at the
end of last year, up from over 50,000 at the beginning of 2020.
The firm said that in Singapore, there was also a 143 per
cent growth in the number of newly registered Huawei developers, with over 90
per cent of the top Singapore apps now compatible with HMS.
These include WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Telegram, Line and Dropbox.
Local apps include those for TraceTogether, ComfortDelGro,
DBS, UOB, The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao. The latest addition at the end
of last month was the Grab app. The government’s SingPass app will soon be
available in the early half of this year.
While they work with Huawei devices, some like WhatsApp can
only be downloaded from other sites and not directly from AppGallery yet.
The number of HMS users has also grown. In February last
year, there were more than 570 million users globally across 170 countries and
regions. At the end of last December, the figure had grown to 700 million
users.
Other ways Huawei is supporting developers beyond the DigiX
Labs include setting up technical teams in key Asia-Pacific markets from last
year to help app developers concerned with costs to port an app for HMS and
jitters over its potential market reach.
Besides technical assistance, Huawei’s HMS team has also
supported app partners by tailoring co-marketing campaigns based on the app’s
unique selling points and local preferences.
Comments
Post a Comment