Chinese networking and telecommunications equipment and services company Huawei Technologies Co remains positive on the Polish market and expects deepening cooperation with local companies, said the CEO of the company's subsidiary in Poland on Sunday.
Poland was the only European country to maintain GDP growth during the financial crisis back in 2008, which showed that the nation has the ability to maintain economic growth at a stable pace, Li Junfeng, CEO of Huawei Poland, told the Global Times in an exclusive interview on Sunday in Warsaw.
The company has been operating in the country for more than a decade, and Poland has become the center stage of Huawei's operations in 26 central, eastern and northern European countries, Li said.
"From 2014 to 2020, Poland will receive an estimated 100 billion euros ($112.8 billion) as funding support from the EU, which guarantees growth momentum not only for the country but also for companies investing here," Li added.
One of the major drivers of Huawei's growth in Poland is the smartphone, according to the CEO. "It has become a medium- to high-end product favored by Polish consumers," he said.
Although analysts believe the Polish smartphone market has reached the saturation point, sales of Huawei smartphones recorded strong growth in the first quarter of 2016, with the company becoming the second-largest vendor in the country, market data tracker International Data Corp (IDC) said in May.
Samsung, the top vendor, captured 29 percent of the market in the first quarter and Huawei accounted for 23 percent, the data showed. Apple only took 11 percent.
There were 1.88 million smartphones sold in Poland in the first quarter of 2016, up 7 percent from the same period in 2015. The low level of growth was due to the saturation of the sector, IDC said.
Huawei and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) in Poland officially inaugurated the PSNC-Huawei Innovation Center in February where joint research in computing, cloud storage and big data will be carried out, Li said. "There will be more cooperation between Huawei and its Polish partners in the R&D sector," he said.
