Huawei Announces $100m Investment in Asia-Pacific Start-up Ecosystem

Huawei on Tuesday announced that it plans to invest US$100 million in startup support at the inaugural HUAWEI CLOUD Spark Founders Summit, which took place simultaneously in Singapore and Hong Kong. Huawei said the investment would go towards its Spark Program in the Asia-Pacific region, which aims to build a “sustainable start-up ecosystem” for the region over the next three years. 

The investment will take place through the company’s Spark Program, a start-up accelerator with operations already launched in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. At the summit, Huawei announced that this program would focus on developing four additional start-up hubs – in Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam – with the aim of recruiting a total of 1,000 start-ups into the Spark accelerator program and shaping 100 of them into scale-ups.

While investment and businesses saw increasing barriers in the US and Europe, the move is seen as the Chinese telecommunications giant’s transfer of focus to Southeast Asia by many industry observers.

Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei’s cloud business unit, said at the summit: “Last year, we launched the Spark Program in Asia-Pacific. Through this program, we are working with local governments, leading incubators, well-known venture capital firms, and top universities to build support platforms for start-ups in many regions. Now, 40 start-ups are participating in our program.”

Huawei also launched three additional initiatives under the Asia-Pacific Spark Program during the summit, in a move to develop its cloud business and further nurture its own ecosystem in the region amid US supplies ban.

The three initiatives are the Spark Developer Program, which aims to nurture a developer ecosystem powered by Huawei in the Asia-Pacific region; the Spark Pitstop Program, designed to onboard and support start-ups on Huawei Cloud to accelerate product development, and the Spark Innovation Program, focused on facilitating enterprise innovation through the Spark start-up ecosystem.

“In 2021, our plan is to support 200 start-ups in the Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) ecosystem, and share our network of channel resources with developers worldwide who together serve 1 billion Huawei device users. In addition, we will open an HMS Developer Innovation Center to support 100,000 HMS cloud-native developers,” Zhang said. Currently, 4.5 million developers from over 170 countries and regions rely on HMS, according to the firm.