 We're here at ITU Telecom World 2015 in Budapest, Hungary, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Paul Michael Scanlon, who is the President of Business and Network Consulting for Huawei Technologies. Paul, thanks for having me with us today. Thank you for having me, Max. Now, the theme here at ITU Telecom World 2015 is accelerating innovation for social impact. I wanted to ask you to begin with, how do you see ICT innovation directly impacting on socio-ineconomic development in China? As I said before, that's a great question. It's this big. So let's try and bring something practical down to, say, from a Huawei perspective. I represent Huawei, so how does Huawei see the innovation component? We like to pride ourselves that we're a very innovative company, and I think for the last 27 years to grow to $60 billion, you must have done something right. And of course, it all started with one man and a couple of thousand dollars. So there starts the seed of innovation, just from his own perspective of the DNA of the company. How has Huawei grown the last 27 years to today? How do we still see this requirement for innovation? And it's very clear from the board of Huawei that without competition, there is no innovation. You have companies like the ITU and of course all the other regulatory bodies around the world, and we're going to be talking about a few of these things, I'm sure, but Huawei believes very much in the ecosystem. So we now realise that we can't just sell boxes and conventional products. We now realise that as a leader, and we've been a leader in the fix, they're now in the mobile for a number of years, and the ICT space is significantly larger, just in the cash terms today. But over the next, say, four to five years, we see that our job as a leader in the industry now is to accelerate this program, and the program means to accelerate the ecosystem. And the only way to do that is through participation with as many different parties, because you need different ideas. So from the industry, why it's great to come to events like ITU, etc. They're particularly important to bring together different people with different DNA. And in terms of where we are here today, we're ITU Telecom World 2015. We've been focusing very much on the growth of SMEs in the ICT sector, and encouraging entrepreneurship here. I know there have been a number of SMEs have been invited here, and I know that Huawei have got some on their pavilion. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about the value of that. It's very interesting. I think this is the first time I've been attending this particular Broadway forum, ITU, for a number of years as both the guest speaker, panellist and chairman of very different facilities. And this is the first time that I've seen this type of program. And just now, and I'm talking with the Secretary-General, Mr. Jal, about the involvement, he made an interesting observation that he had spent almost one year trying to incubate this for this event, for this one day, for that two-hour session that we just had outside. And he was a little disappointed, not a little, I think he was significantly disappointed that so few SMEs had actually participated or had come here from around the world. But then I'd have to say he turned to me and he was actually delighted by those maybe 15 that did attend and of the quality of their participation in terms of the way they want to engage, the big enterprises, in terms of sharing their experiences in how they are trying to develop, grow or survive. And so the Secretary-General made some comments to me and said, you know, Huawei, how does Huawei and how Huawei help? So we had comments from the SMEs in terms of what they were trying to do and some of their problems. And then they had questions to the larger enterprises on how can we help in this particular area? So the two things that I think are interesting, number one, that the ITU has started to focus on things beyond its traditional standardization or standards function, which was, you know, the old CCITT days when I was a junior engineer 40 years ago, to where it is today, which is understanding that you need this community. So from Huawei's perspective, we have a number of programs from, we say conventional corporate social responsibility programs, which were largely give 1000 computers or devices or put a million dollars here or $100,000 there to an incubation program. So the incubation program, what will it do? It will facilitate through both pure cash, plus training and knowledge transfer together with an enablement of an ecosystem, very micro ecosystem. So it's almost like an investment in an SME. So we identify certain types of SMEs that we think will grow something, okay, not just their business, but allowed to allow it to grow and be replicated. And that's an alternative mechanism. And that's purely SME based. Now, the comment I made at the forum just now with the Secretary General was to suggest that this type of program is far more effective, should be far more effective in a couple of ways. First of all, the SME doesn't have to go and find the money and have to report a P&L to a venture capital company or seed funder, which is always under threat of. And the second one is he gets the benefit of an enterprise who's started from there in a market that he understands. He understands the product and where, how it will facilitate and where he will get his money. So we're not going to get our return on our investment through the direct injection. We're going to get our return on funds through growing an ecosystem. And I think that's a very interesting way of approaching SMEs from a Huawei perspective. That's only one small area. A program we've had for a number of years is our digital services program. And through the digital services program, we've learned that if we want to sell a digital services platform to an operator, to a customer, there's no value in it because they need the partnerships of all the application developers. So now we have collected through a program, some 1600 digital services providers, and we go together to customers. And this facilitates that ecosystem. And I think this is a great example of enterprises from a vending perspective to an operator, to the consumers and SMEs in a real ecosystem development. It's very difficult to do. It's not something that everybody's got the stamina for or has deep pockets to continue funding and keep it moving. But it's a very successful program today for Huawei. It's great. And it's an inspiring story as well from humble beginnings to the incredible company that it is today. And I wanted to just ask you in terms of the value of attending events such as ITU Telecom World, you've got a great pavilion here. I just, there's obviously been investment of both of time and resources in here. I just really wanted to find out what is the value of attending events such as ITU Telecom World for a company like Huawei? Right. It's, again, I think a particularly pertinent question because Huawei always looks at which are the appropriate marketing events and then, you know, from a brand perspective as well as what's the key message that we want to do, what's the purpose. So I've personally been thinking about this one on from my my department's perspective, but also from Huawei's perspective. And I was saying to my colleagues earlier on today and then yesterday that this particular ITU forum, I think is one of the best. And I think every year I've seen it improve and improve. Now, why do I think it's the best or improving so rapidly? First of all, I think the venue has seems to have attracted a lot more participants than I've seen. Maybe I didn't get out as much last time. So perhaps that's something to consider. But the quality of certainly at the ministerial level that have visited Huawei's pavilion from what I observe and also from engaging directly at us at our Broadway forum. We always have a theme every year promoting Broadway. We're passionate about connecting everybody. And if you don't have national broadband networks as a foundation, you can't connect anything. So a government can have an ICT transformation idea. But if nothing's connected, nothing will happen. And if you're not going to have a machine to machine strategy or an analytic strategy, things will grow very slowly. So this particular event, why I think they're so important, it brings this collaboration together. It gives Huawei the opportunity to reinforce the theme of why we believe broadband is so essential to development of life and quality of life. The second thing that I've noticed is that it allows us to bring together, we think we have about 450 customers globally. So these case studies as we're doing them, over the last 12 months, things have changed. And we're able to not just reinforce the first message, but we're also able to demonstrate how the market has moved on, how the technology has moved on, how different programs have occurred. And success stories and failure stories so that this partnership of companies and countries gets to learn. It was very interesting, we had one, if I may say, from one country in Africa, who we said we'd been working with for the last two years, and finally we're putting ours on track, the NBN. And sitting next to him is the minister from the adjacent African country. And we're collaborating together so that they can learn from us. It took them two years. It will take the other country perhaps one year. The third country that will come next year most likely, they'll finish everything in three months. So you can see that the time to market for this type of business development, if you want to call it that way, is coming down. So this collaboration can't happen in any other event. It's very difficult. We could go to sub-Saharan Africa or to Central Asia and have a forum here and a forum here. And you do bring some of these groups of people together and give ideas. But I think the ITU here has and the members are able to bring collectively a bigger group together to foster exchange of ideas. The next thing I think why it's so important and if the direction of the ITU continues is particularly down the road of the SMEs because without SMEs you don't create competition. They're the ones that disrupt everything. The OTTs, they've been disrupting. They're the ones that make all the big enterprises to take notice of what's happening and to think of other alternatives of how to do business differently. And that creates new different business models which also raises the stakes but also raises the quality I think of the solutions and the topics. So that's why I'm hoping Huawei and expecting Huawei will continue to be here, year after year. Brilliant, just brings me to my final question really. You've obviously got your finger on the pulse. Just looking at the future what do you think are going to be the major opportunities or challenges in the ICT sector? Transformation. So pretty much every operator, every telecom operator understands that they need to evolve to transform. The key question is to transform into what and having decided that then how to do it and that's always the challenge. The strategy is great. We all have great strategies but what's the execution of the strategy and what tactics do we deploy? The journey that most operators are on, so operators understand the challenges of the OTTs. They understand the challenges of real-time, online, do-it-yourself, always on and social. The ROADS that we call it in Huawei, they all understand these are the new driving forces. It's not making a voice minute anymore and selling a voice minute. People are consuming differently. The behaviour is changing. It's driven largely by a younger culture. We are all old men, right? We have a different view of how the world should change more slowly and everybody else wants to do it yesterday. The second component is the rapid advance in technology. That hasn't happened over the last 150 years that has happened over the last five to six years. These two factors now mean operators must transform. If they decide they want to be a digital company, what does it mean? If they want to be a video company, what does it mean? Do they want to enter the SMB market or get revenue from this instead of traditional methods? How do they do that? They have organisational problems, process problems, they have capability problems. At least one operator in every country is still somehow linked to a government which has government responsibility like employment. They are very different factors compared with quarter on quarter earnings. So this is the challenge that operators face. What's great is there are so many of these challenges that I think the world is just a great oyster and there's lots of pearls there. So it's good for everybody I think. Paul Michael Scanlon, thank you very much indeed. My pleasure Max. Thank you.