 Welcome to ITU Telecom World 2018 here in Durban, South Africa, where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Dr. Mohamed Makhour, who is the vice president for wireless networks and marketing solutions for Huawei. Dr. Makhour, thank you very much for joining us today. Well thank you for having me again. Now it's great. We've catching up with you, saw you about a year ago, what do you wanted to find out? What has changed since we last met? Yeah, we last met actually in Busan last year. On that chat I focused on the definition of transformation and how that this is not a goal by itself. It's a journey of a bunch of changes for carrier business, technology and also operation. And I pointed out that that needs to be fast. And I'm glad this year that ITU they are talking about better sooner. So I think we are in the same page. I think today what I wanted to say is we actually we have been seeing a lot of changes that is happening. And some of them economic changes, others technology changes and also demographic changes. But more importantly what we have seen over the last year or two is that the telecom industry now is kind of a soil that used to cultivate and grow other industry. And I think that kind of a change is the key for telcos to kind of trying to rediscover or invent themselves. Now talking about growing, there's been a lot of talk of smart digital development. What does it mean to you? Smart is important. It's intelligence. We're all talking about AI these days. Digital development to me, it's again in the same path. It's all about how telcos can find the most efficient profitable development path so that they can get to the point of business sustainability. To be honest what we have seen so far and our interactions with telcos in different markets that telcos feel a little bit unsettled. Sometimes they feel scared maybe of the changes. But we've seen a lot of telcos that already took steps for that digital development. The fear for the change is still there. And the balance between the short term, KPI, business KPI and the long term goal has always been the key thing there. They are keen about finding the right partner, the right talent. And more importantly I think the investment economics or kind of having the best experience or the best business was the minimum capex and optics. So these are for me the ingredients for smart digital development in general for telcos around the world. And what are the roadblocks for carriers? There are actually, I would say they are a psychological barrier to be honest. And as I described I don't want to repeat myself, it's more like the fear of change. Telcos have been in the comfortable zone for a long time doing the business. But now I think what they need to do and how to discover themselves and adapt. So overcoming this psychological barrier is one. And the other thing is again how can I continue my business and at the same time going over the investment fear or the economics of business in general. Kind of balancing supply and demand and also revenue cost equation. This has been a big roadblock for carriers. So we're trying to make things more quick, more effective for them. And so how should telcos react and transform in order to cope with current industry mandates? Well, the first thing is I think they need to focus on their assets. What are the carrier strengths? I think connectivity still is the key strength of our carrier. But now talking about connectivity it is not just a pipe itself, connectivity is what is it for? So how to grab the value of the connectivity? First of all can I build it and expand the connectivity for universal coverage for example? And then how can I use it as valuable assets for me? I think that's the key thing that we can do in order to adapt for the changes. The second point for that is don't be locked into consumer business segment. I have seen many telcos now they are intensifying their vertical ecosystem construction on how to go beyond that. We've seen many going for home business, home road band or maybe enterprise verticals and IOT and for all of those I think technology has been paving the way for all of those and things are so exciting I believe. Talking about exciting, this is quite an exciting event, lots of things going on here. What's the value of attending ITU Telecom World for you? It's been actually I mean every year I come here first of all I personally enjoy it you know it's the key thing about ITU I think to to to conduct that event in different continent and different part of the world to me that gives us a kind of different angle of the transfer we can keep talking about transformation for a long time but you need to get into the area to see what's exactly people are doing here and being in Africa I think I think we all know the the the gaps of transformation and connectivity in Africa and and this year actually we're talking about universal coverage for a continent like Africa and how to connect the digital divide so so having ITU here and that area of the world emerging markets contributes a lot I mean we have to pay attention to this. Couple that with a lot of good topics that you guys have here beyond the connectivity or emerging markets artificial intelligence even 5G you know even talking about 5G here in this market is kind of exciting and a lot of people have been asking us in Huawei you know how can 5G talk about 5G here I always say you know 5G is a function of the place and the time so at this time and that place there are some ingredients for success even for 5G and a third the point for that is the collaboration and and how to cross talk about different things with different people at the same time which is actually in line with what we do in Huawei so we believe in cultivating collaboration among all of the ecosystem supplier that's also a great thing to do so all of that are the strength of your event and it's in line with what we see and I'm sure we're going to have a lot of exciting time here getting our hands into the key problems and trying to improve it. Mohamed, thank you very much for being with us today. It's been a pleasure thank you so much. Thank you.