The FINANCIAL — Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016, Telefónica and Huawei announced yesterday they are joining forces to develop the Smart Home category in Latin America.
Using Huawei´s cloud based platform and a jointly designed exclusive user experience, Telefónica will provide their Latin American customers with an innovative Smart Home experience, becoming the first telco to offer these services in the region. This collaboration strengthens the operator commitment to bringing the latest technology to their customers, going along with them in its discovery and use.
Huawei´s Smart Home platform is a cloud-based solution that will allow Telefónica to rapidly deploy an end to end smart home solution in multiple Latin American markets. This best-in-class platform follows the highest standards in terms of security and reliability and it is designed as an open and rich ecosystem, in which OEMs and relevant players in the IoT arena can be integrated and become part of a strong smart home proposition, extending their market reach, according to Huawei.
“We aim to deliver a really unique and easy to use smart home experience. Through their smartphone, our customers will be able to check what is going at their homes when they are away and interact with a variety of connected and smart devices. We believe this service will help our customers in their daily routines, providing them with greater convenience, peace of mind and closeness to their homes and families” said Michael Duncan, Telefónica Group CEO of the Consumer Unit. “Huawei is a trusted Telefonica partner with a deep understanding of Latin American markets and they will be a great support to deliver to our customers the experience we are aiming for”
Haixu Ma, president of Core Network of Huawei commented: “The Smart Home category will become a new growth point of operators and other players in the era of ICT. We are sure Huawei’s Smart Home platform will provide with a differential experience to Telefonica’s customers. We have been working together with Telefonica in the region for many years, and joining forces to explore this new category is a natural move for both companies.”
According to Strategy Analytics, more than 245 million households worldwide will have some sort of smart home product or service by 2020. Telefonica is committed to making this space bloom in Latin America helping their customers take control of their digital life. “Latin America is fertile ground to develop a robust smart home market,” stated Bill Ablondi, director of Strategy Analytics’ Smart Home Research. “There has been growing progress in smart home activity in the region and we expect to see 15 to 16 million households there with smart home solutions by 2020 and annual spending reaching $7 to $8 billion by then.”
Telefonica and Huawei have already started their first trial of this proposition and are aiming to start to launch commercially in the region during 2016.
