Chinese multinational technology corporation Huawei expects that spending on global digital transformation will reach $3.4-trillion by 2026, as more than 170 countries and regions are developing their own digital strategies.

Speaking at Huawei’s twentieth Global Analyst Conference, Huawei VC and CFO Sabrina Meng said that, to date, the company had built in-depth partnerships with nearly 200 power enterprises globally and provided digital services for more than 20 leading oil and gas enterprises and 800 mining enterprises.

The conference was held in Shenzhen, China, last month.

Hauwei is enabling productivity and efficiency improvements across industries such as mining, healthcare, ports and transportation.

Its current plans include building digital infrastructure that will support these increasingly diverse and complex industrial scenarios. These networks require ultrareliable and fast connections between people and intelligent objects, and between homes and factories.

“We aim to provide our customers with digital infrastructure that has the simplest possible architecture and the highest possible quality, delivering the best possible experience at the lowest possible costs.

“Our goal is to help organisations go digital in four stages: digitalising operations, building digital platforms, enabling platform-based intelligence, and putting intelligence to use. The time is ripe to thrive together in this new and exciting digital future,” said Meng.

She shared three major takeaways from Huawei’s nearly ten years of digital transformation experience.

Firstly, “strategy is essential”, as digital transformation is about strategic planning and strategic choices: “Any successful digital transformation has to be driven by strategy, not technology.”

Secondly, “data is the foundation”, as it creates value only when it flows across an organisation: “Methodical data governance is key. Integrating data across different dimensions will create even greater value,” she added.

Thirdly, “intelligence is the destination”. Digitalising operations and building digital platforms helps to clean, visualise, and aggregate data, laying the foundation for digital transformation. Using intelligence makes data on-demand easier to understand and actionable, taking digital transformation to the next level.

Huawei Institute of Strategic Research president Dr Zhou Hong shared the company’s hypotheses and visions for a future intelligent world, detailing how experience could be transformed into structured knowledge, and lay the foundation for intelligence.

Rethinking approaches to networks and computing is critical in moving towards an intelligent world.

“In networking, we have what it takes to move beyond the limits of Shannon’s theorems – as well as applications of his theory – to drive a 100-fold increase in network capabilities over the next decade.