Last month, Huawei appointed Radoslaw Kedzia as Uganda’s new CEO. He, this week, spoke to PC Tech about his ambitions in his latest latest role at company.
How comfortable are you with the position of the company you’ve just inherited? Do you feel Huawei is, relative to competition, in a strong position?
Transition is always a process, it doesn’t happen overnight. Am finalizing reinforcement of our in-house capability. Am confident with the current team and resources, solutions and Market capability we can continue to provide better choices for our customers. We are not focusing on disadvantages of our competitors but rather focusing on our strengths.
Huawei is leading global ICT solutions provider, has been in Africa for over 15 years and over 10 years in Uganda contributing to the growth of the local ICT Industry, this gives us confidence of our position in this market.
What is Huawei doing to help increase internet access to the people of Uganda and Africa generally?
We don’t sell internet directly to the end users, but we indirectly influence. We have the fast internet equipment and devices to enable operators facilitate this. This is our contribution.
Huawei is committed to bridging the digital divide and making broadband access universally available in the region. We are working continuously to improve broadband construction in Eastern and Southern Africa, especially that of the remote mountainous areas. We are providing high-speed wireless long term evolution (LTE) networks and 100G metropolitan optical networks in countries like South Africa and Angola. We are also deploying wireless networks that cover the remote mountainous areas in Mozambique, DR Congo, and Angola.
Apart from the operators, Huawei doesn’t appear to be engaging with local players and other stakeholders. Why so? Can we expect things to be different now that you’re in charge?
Operators form a key part of our customers, but we still are engaging our other stakeholders in the region.
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In future for Uganda, I wish to build a distributor network and cooperate with local systems integrators of solutions. We plan to hold a conference inviting key players/distributors in the market and share our vision and solutions.
Are you able to highlight some of Huawei’s biggest achievements over the last few years?
ICT development can significantly boost GDP. The World Bank estimates that a 10% increase in national broadband penetration in developing countries, results in 1.38% GDP growth.
Huawei is one of the largest supplier of telecommunication solutions in Africa, with the biggest footprint in the region. This is because our solutions are reliable, scalable, and future proof.
Our ideology is to make hardware irrelevant, and focus on building platforms that can be easily be evolved to the next generation. Therefore we have our single RAN, Single Core, Single SDP, solutions and we are working on completing Single Transport Metro solution. This is why our customers choose us because we help them to maintain their CAPEX/OPEX on reasonable levels as well as assure long term investment return.
Large of our affordable smartphones e.g. IDEOS was a paradigm shift in the smartphone market in the region. This was the trigger for all the vendors to put their focus on Africa. So now using of smartphones is affordable in Africa making us the market differentiator.
What are some of the key products and services Huawei is intending to push on the Ugandan market?
Huawei is one of the biggest company that nobody heard about. We are a 35billion revenue company globally. The variety of our products and solutions is incredible. However, in Uganda I believe we can provide latest devices for the end users, if you have a modem for example, its 90% chance Huawei. We will also continue to make it easier for mobile operators to provide high quality services to subscribers. Also invest in building local distributor channels. We will use our solutions offering for Carrier network solutions (for operators), Consumer devices (end users), and Enterprise solutions (for enterprises, governments etc) to meet our Uganda customers’ needs.
What is Huawei doing to improve the rate of innovation in the region? Is the company working with any innovation hubs?
As part of a worldwide integrated product development process, Huawei operates a global network of 14 regional headquarters, 16 R&D centers, 28 innovations centers jointly operated with customers and 45 training centers. By December 31st, 2012, Huawei has joined around 150 standard organizations, holding more than 180 positions. In 2012, Huawei filed over 5,000 standard proposals in total. And Huawei has filed a total of 41,948 patent operations in China. 12,453 PCT patent applications and 14,494 patent applications outside of China. A total of 30,240patent applications have been granted.
In the Eastern and Southern Africa region, Huawei has established one regional R&D center in South Africa, and 4 telecoms training centers in Kenya, South Africa, DR Congo, and Angola. Huawei has also initiated an innovation hub in Kenya, as part of our commitment to provide latest cutting edge technology in the region and Uganda. Uganda has more robust and latest releases of the latest transmission network than Europe. This translates to better internet speeds. Last year, Huawei hosted an inter-university android applications challenge and sponsored the annual innovation challenge organized by the Makerere University’s College of Engineering, Design, Art and Technology,
How does Huawei drive the deployment of LTE across Africa?
Most LTE networks in Africa run on Huawei Radio and Core solutions. In Uganda we were the first to support our customer to launch LTE. Huawei has helped launch LTE networks in South Africa, Angola, Mauritius, among other countries in the region. Also we provide largest variety of LTE devices. This proves our quality, and our delivery capability.
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About Radoslaw Kedzia
Mr. Radoslaw Kedzia assumed the Managing Director role for Huawei in Uganda in May 2013. He previously served as the company’s Regional Chief Technology Officer (Vice President) for the East & Southern Region and the Chief Operations Officer (COO) of Huawei Technologies in Kenya since joining the company in 2008.
Mr. Kedzia has over 15 years extensive international experience in management and operations with large telecommunication firms in Poland, UK, Israel, and Czech Republic.
Prior to joining Huawei, Mr. Kedzia worked in different senior capacities as a lead consultant at eServGlobal, Head of R&D Department at Safaricom Ltd and as Solution Architect at Ericsson Ltd-UK.
Mr. Kedzia is a reknow industry speaker delivering key note speeches in events such as the East Africa Com, ATU Conference among others.
Mr. Kedzia is a graduate of Warsaw University of Technology in Information Technologies, University of Warsaw Marketing and Management, and Technical School of Telecommunication in Warsaw in Transmission & Telecommunication.
