Huawei To Build Data Centres In South Africa

Chinese Huawei, the biggest maker of electronics it said plans to overtake Apple Inc from the market in the coming two to three year...

Chinese Huawei, the biggest maker of electronics it said plans to overtake Apple Inc from the market in the coming two to three years as it introduces new technologies. Photo: Kiyoshi Ota.

China’s Huawei will build two data centres in South Africa from March, it said, as part of plans to expand cloud services across Africa. “The company is working with South African partners for the construction of the data centres in Johannesburg initially and later Cape Town,” Huawei said in a statement. Its cloud service will be available to organizations in South Africa as well as neighboring countries, it said.  Huawei, the Chinese biggest electronics maker, and network equipment said it plans to overtake Apple Inc. in the world smartphone market in the coming two to three years as it introduces new technologies.

The Chinese firm, Huawei is at the centre of global security concerns and nevertheless will challenge Amazon.com Inc, which is also expanding its presence in Africa with the emerging tech hub at Cape Town in a challenge against cloud computing system of Microsoft Corp, another rival. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the global leader in cloud computing system. In the last quarter of 2018 AWS’s revenue grew 46% to $7 billion while Microsoft’s grew 76% to $4 billion to remain in second place, data from research firm Canalys showed.

Recently, China has been accused of deploying industrial espionage in some of its products and software: However, China decries that it's a 'political manipulations' especially the one behind the Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou's extradition bid from Canada. In January 2019 China blasted the US for 'bullying' with Huawei CFO, terming that Washington did not comply with international law as well as neither possess the legitimacy to trial Huawei's chief.

---