China’s tech giant Huawei announced on Tuesday its plan to invest $100 million in startup support at the inaugural HUAWEI CLOUD Spark Founders Summit, which took place simultaneously in Singapore and Hong Kong.
The investment would go towards its Spark Program in the Asia Pacific region, which aims to build a sustainable startup ecosystem for the region over the next three years, Huawei said in a statement.
The company said it has been helping Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand build their startup hubs.
The program would focus its efforts on developing four additional startup hubs – in Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam – with the overarching aim of recruiting a total of 1,000 startups into the Spark accelerator program and shaping 100 of them into scaleups.
“For the past two decades, we have remained committed to being ‘In Asia Pacific, For Asia Pacific’. Leveraging Huawei’s global customer base and full-stack technologies, the Spark Program will invest more than $100 million over the next three years, and provide comprehensive support to the establishment of a sustainable startup ecosystem that creates new value for this dynamic region,” Jeffery Liu, President for Asia Pacific Region of Huawei said.
At the summit, Huawei also launched its Cloud-plus-Cloud Collaboration and Joint Innovation Program, to further ramp up its support for startups around the world.
“Huawei will devote ongoing efforts and leverage its complete business portfolio in the cloud-plus-cloud collaboration space to foster technological innovation, global and local services, and business ecosystems, accelerating the growth of startups,” it added.
Three additional initiatives under the Asia Pacific Spark Program were launched by Huawei at the event: The Spark Developer Program, which aims to nurture a developer ecosystem powered by HUAWEI CLOUD in the Asia Pacific region; the Spark Pitstop Program, designed to onboard and support startups on HUAWEI CLOUD to accelerate product development; and the Spark Innovation Program (SIP), focused on facilitating enterprise innovation through the Spark startup ecosystem.
“Startups and SMEs are the innovators, disruptors, and pioneers of our times. 34 years ago, Huawei was a startup with just 5,000 dollars of registered capital. Recently, we have been thinking: How can we leverage our experience and resources to help more startups address their challenges? Doing so would allow them to seize the opportunities posed by digital transformation, achieve business success, and develop more innovative products and solutions for the world,” Huawei Senior Vice President and Board Member Catherine Chen said.
“Last year, we launched the Spark Program in Asia Pacific. Through this program, we are working with local governments, leading incubators, well-known VC firms, and top universities to build support platforms for startups in many regions. Now 40 startups are participating in our program,” Huawei’s Cloud Business Unit Chief Executive Officer Zhang Ping’an said.
“Today, we launched our Cloud-plus-Cloud Collaboration and Joint Innovation Program, through which we will support startups with $40 million worth of resources. Half of that investment is coming from HUAWEI CLOUD, half from Huawei Mobile Services (HMS). In 2021, our plan is to support 200 startups in the 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,” he added.
The tech company said HUAWEI CLOUD infrastructure works in conjunction with Huawei Mobile Services to support startups from all industries. Huawei’s cloud offerings help developers and partners to unify accounts, development platforms, and app distribution and operation.
HMS is now the world’s third-largest mobile app ecosystem and is helping many startups expand their global influence. Currently, 4.5 million developers from over 170 countries and regions rely on HMS, according to Huawei.
Featured image credits: Huawei