Italy recently hosted the ZTE 5G Summit & User Congress, “Inspire the Digital Transformation”, the largest international annual forum on the topic of 5G, hosted by ZTE every year.

Based on industry developments, prestigious guests and industrial thought leaders from global operators, government representatives, consulting institutions, industry partners, and pioneering ICT organizations exchanged industrial insights and innovations. The two-day event examined 5G and beyond innovation.

Video Interview with ZTE Senior Vice President Jianpeng Zhang

In a wide-ranging video interview, ZTE Senior Vice President Jianpeng Zhang gave EU Reporter ZTE’s vision of future 5G development, the need to innovate, and to continually invest in future technology.

Jianpeng Zhan told EU Reporter : “If you look at our development and actually ZTE was found founded in 1985, it’s almost the same time as the first generation of mobile technology demonstrated.

So, for more than seven years almost already experienced 1G,2G,3G,4G, and at the very beginning and in the industry, in the telecom industry, there were close to more than 10 vendors we can say.

There are now 4 majors, so such kind of industry has a very high requirement for technical innovation. If you look at the transformation of technology in the industry, you will obviously find that almost every decade new innovative technology will be invented.

So that means you must keep on, keep on investment, investing in innovation always. 5G is such kind of complicated technology, it is extremely highly dependent on technological innovation, something unique compared with all the past technologies that 5G is more concentrated on the 2B and vertical collaboration business model.

This is some differentiation from all the past technologies. So, we expect this revolutionary technology will bring that revolutionary change, the change we are expressing to each corner of our society, and this is totally beyond our traditional concept of the end users-based model.

So that means it could be one of the four major vendors who are needing this technology. It’s highly dependent on heavy investment in innovation technology. Every year we almost invest more than 15% of our revenue in the ID.

The second thing is that we keep our very close pace connected with our customers, always so. Even we are facing a lot of uncertainty, especially in such kind of pandemic environment.

Still, as you see that although the marketing and sales team are firmly close to our customers that means if you can zero-touch with your customer that means you can feel the demands of the customer, and then you can keep the needing, you could capture the leading demands in the first in the day, day one. You can demonstrate your leading technology adapt to the exact market need.

If you look at the 2G’s in the 2G and 3G, we are a little bit behind, to be honest. We have to say that, but after the in the 4G age we have already become a leader and 5G benefited from the very early and heavy investment and we could see that. We already become the pioneer of this domain.

5G is such a kind of complicated and comprehensive technology. Its success is highly dependent on the whole ecosystem’s success. So what it means is that it could have such kind of advantage obviously to build our strength in this point.

The first one is that we must admit that we have benefited from the larger scale of communication from the Chinese 5G market. Today, actually you see the report from the GSMA, also some of our customers like China Telecom speakers introduced that by the end of this year 5G sites could achieve two million. So this number really occupies more than 70 %, contributes 70% of the global commissioned 5G.

The number doesn’t mean not only means the skills of sales, it means the largest skills of the commercialization. So new technology definitely needed a large scale of trial to trigger the maturity and a lot of customers when we are talking about the 5G and try to introduce the leading advantages of 5G, how this technology can benefit their operation.

They always worry about this because the extreme leading technology definitely means higher costs.

Unfortunately, the telecom operator already become an extremely low profitable business. So, it’s very crucial for them to consider how to return from such kind of heavy investment. Everyone knows that advantage, but how to make the business model successful, that’s the key issue. I think the benefit from the large scale of the correlation means that you could have the opportunity to trigger the maturity of the supply chain.

That means you can help to establish the comprehensive and support the whole supply chain to become more cost-effective. So that’s where it’s essential if your product is needed but it’s not affordable it will not become very successful technology. So lately, since the beginning, we already pay high attention to this point.

Our aim is quite clear to decouple the complexity of the leading technology and reserve all the difficult things in our hands. But we need to ensure all our customers share all the convenience. That means simplicity should be always in the hand of our customers, otherwise, they will not choose you for this technology.

This is one part On the other hand, we still have a long journey to go forward to make the 5G area more successful. For example, we always pursue fast data service, the customer always pursues seamless coverage to can connect to the network anywhere and for this year this traditional area I think is already been resolved very, very sufficiently. It is a newly introduced aspect of the 5G technology.

I think to be a pioneer of the 5G technology means you need to make a lot of successful 5G applications, through which the market can introduce the 5G new technology.

We already collaborated with vertical industries with more than thousands of partners, and also we join in with our partners to demonstrate in hundreds of different cases to verify the possibility of success. Most of them can apparently see the benefit of such content and technology, and we will continue to enhance our investment in the 2B model.

Of course, I will recognize that as a leading technology we need to make it the priority. We make a lot of change in the revolutionary continuous innovation, We give it the name 5G2B.

Our concept is based on our three core strong points, that is the architecture, reliability, and cheaper set. This is our essential technology foundation for our solution we were continuing to enhance such kind of points continuously to assure that we can contribute not only to the Chinese market, and will continue contributing to the known global market in the next five years.  Thank you. “