Huawei to invest $1.5bn in developer program

Huawei announced on Wednesday plans to invest $1.5bn on its developer program over the next five years and its intention to offer deeper access to its 5G secrets as part of its latest computing strategy.

The Huawei Developer Program was first announced in 2015 and had thus far enrolled over 1.3m developers and 14,000 independent software vendors around the world.

Huawei said that it would reveal more details on the developer program on 20 September, deputy chairman Ken Hu told attendees at the Huawei Connect 2019 conference in Shanghai.

Also on Wednesday, the company unveiled Atlas 900, which it promoted as the fastest cluster for training artificial in the world, which was designed for use in scientific research and business development.

Ken also weighed in on foreign countries' security concerns surrounding the firm's telecommunications equipment and software.

“There are a lot of concerns over Huawei’s 5G solutions. We believe those concerns are groundless,” Hu told reporters in Shanghai. “By allowing others to acquire these technologies via commercial methods, it will help reduce the concerns.”

Huawei is accelerating its outreach after the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the sale of US technology to the Asian firm and encouraged allies not to roll-out its 5G network technology over espionage concerns.

“The future of computing is a massive market worth more than two trillion US dollars,” Hu said separately in a statement.

“We’ll keep investing."

China's telecoms equipment champion also bumped up its estimate of 5G contract wins.

Earlier in September, it said that it had secured more than 50 5G commercial contracts despite the objections and hurdles thrown up by Washington. But in his comments to reporters on Wednesday, Hu upped the number of contract wins to 60.

Ken also said that while the roll-out was accelerating, especially in Asia, the company believed that it would still need to “wait for a while before 5G contributes a sizeable share to revenue”.

“We will have a clearer picture by mid-next year because by then the first batch of 5G commercial roll-outs in China will reach a certain phase,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a company conference.

Huawei was expected to unveil a new high-end smartphone the next day.