LIVE FROM HUAWEI ANALYST SUMMIT 2016, SHENZHEN: Huawei’s aggressive push to diversify beyond network equipment has led to 19 per cent annual growth of its services business over the past five years, with its global market share reaching 30 per cent.

Services revenue last year grew 15 per cent to top $12 billion and accounted for 33 per cent of the carrier group’s revenue, said Wei Beng, CMO of Huawei’s global technical service department.

These figures are slightly behind rival Ericsson, which reported $13.4 billion revenue last year for its Global Services division (representing 44 per cent of total company sales).

Wei said revenue doubled in four years and the company expects continued high growth over the next two to three years. While he couldn’t provide a specific target, he said the growth could be faster than the 19 per cent annual growth in the past.

“Carriers are in a critical period of new service development and business transformation. New services such as video, the cloud and IoT are imposing completely new requirements on networks and operations.” He said this shift is creating big opportunities for its services business.

According to ABI Research, Huawei is now the market leader in network managed services, he said, noting it has about 400 total contracts, running 150 networks across 80 countries.

He said it is working on more than 70 commercial NFV and SDN projects worldwide.

Wei told Mobile World Live that Chinese operators account for only a small part of its services business, with the majority of contracts in Europe and other parts of Asia.