Huawei announced its plan to invest US$100 million in start-up 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 Programme in the Asia Pacific region, which aims to build a sustainable start-up ecosystem for the region over the next three years.
Huawei has been helping Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand build their start-up hubs. At the summit, Huawei also announced that this programme would focus its efforts on developing four additional start-up hubs – in Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam – with the overarching aim of recruiting a total of 1,000 start-ups into the Spark accelerator programme and shaping 100 of them into scale-ups.
Also at this summit, Huawei launched its Cloud-plus-Cloud Collaboration and Joint Innovation Programme, to further ramp up its support for start-ups around the world. Huawei will devote on-going 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 start-ups.
This summit was attended by representatives from many prominent Asian start-ups, academia, various industries and governments, and the media, as well as more than 50 regional top venture capitalists and over 300 start-up founders. Speeches and panels at the event focused on the social value of this start-up ecosystem and how start-ups can promote technological and ecosystem innovation, to contribute to local communities and drive socioeconomic development.
Three additional initiatives under the Asia Pacific Spark Programme were launched by Huawei at the event: The Spark Developer Programme, which aims to nurture a developer ecosystem powered by HUAWEI CLOUD in the Asia Pacific region; the Spark Pitstop Programme, designed to onboard and support start-ups on HUAWEI CLOUD to accelerate product development and the Spark Innovation Programme (SIP), focused on facilitating enterprise innovation through the Spark start-up ecosystem.
Huawei Senior Vice President and Board Member, Catherine Chen, opened the summit by emphasising how important start-ups are to social advancement and what Huawei is doing to support start-ups: “Start-ups and SMEs are the innovators, disruptors and pioneers of our times. Thirty-four years ago, Huawei was a start-up with just US$5,000 of registered capital. Recently, we have been thinking: How can we leverage our experience and resources to help more start-ups 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.”
Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei’s Cloud Business Unit, said, “Since its launch in 2017, HUAWEI CLOUD has been the world’s fastest-growing cloud and has driven the growth of countless start-ups. Last year, we launched the Spark Programme in Asia Pacific. Through this programme, we are working with local governments, leading incubators, well-known VC firms and top universities to build support platforms for start-ups in many regions. Now 40 start-ups are participating in our programme.”
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