LIVE FROM HUAWEI CONNECT, SHANGHAI: Huawei rotating CEO Eric Xu said its enterprise group’s target to expand revenue to $10 billion by next year will be pushed back one year to 2018.

During a media briefing today, Xu said the company is generally on track to meet the ambitious goal, but it won’t hit the $10 billion threshold until 2018, which is a year behind the target announced in early 2014.

Huawei said in July when it released its H1 results that its enterprise business is on a “fast development track”. The company didn’t breakout enterprise revenue for the January-June period, but last year it expanded 44 per cent to CNY27.6 billion ($4.3 billon).

To give an idea of the scale of its current operations, Xu said 10,000 people are working on IT application development, with 3,000 of them internal staff.

Xu, who spoke this morning about the need to reshape the cloud, noted that one reason for its heavy investment in the cloud is to reshape the carrier network, which will be important to stay competitive in the telco space.

He said the company doesn’t have any plans to provide cloud services outside of China.

Huawei has set a revenue target of $75 billion for the company as a whole this year — revenue last year was $59 billion.