South Africa is ranked among 21 countries that are regarded as 'adopters' in terms of investing and deploying digital infrastructure to achieve economic digitisation.
This is according to William Xu, Huawei executive director of the board and chief strategy marketing officer, who named SA in the group of 'adopters', which includes nations like China, Russia and Qatar that have a strong digital infrastructure.
Adopters are nations whose focus is on increasing ICT demand to facilitate industry digitisation and high-quality economic growth.
Xu was speaking today during the keynote address of the 13th Huawei Analyst Summit 2016 in Shenzhen, China.
He said ICT infrastructure build is the engine of any country's digital development strategy.
According to Xu, government in East African nation Kenya needs to regard ICT infrastructure as its top priority.
Xu's comments are in line with the release of the Chinese telco's third annual 2016 Global Connectivity Index (GCI), which measures progress in terms of connectivity of 50 countries (accounting for 90% of global gross domestic) in enhancing connectivity and enabling digital transformation.
The GCI measures how the nations are progressing with digital transformation based on 40 indicators that cover supply, demand, experience and the potential of five technology enablers, namely broadband, data centres, cloud, big data and Internet of things (IOT).
The report groups the countries into three clusters based on their relative position on the map. The clusters are starters, adopters and front-runners.
The starters are countries in the early stages of ICT infrastructure build-out. Their focus is on increasing ICT supply to give more people access to the digital world. Meanwhile, the front-runners are developed economies that continually boost user experience, and use big data analytics and IOT to develop a smarter, more efficient society.
The report further highlights that great improvements across the globe have been made in broadband coverage and speed, but nations are also making headway with cloud, big data and IOT.
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