Huawei Targets European Channel: Over a Billion Dollar Goal by 2026
In Como, for the third consecutive year, Huawei gathered its European partners from the enterprise division. The message from Willi Song, President of Huawei Europe Enterprise Business, was clear: over 90% of the European division's revenue comes from the channel, and in the next three years the company will invest to further increase that share. The declared goal for 2026 is to surpass one billion dollars in enterprise revenues in Europe, maintaining a partner share above 90%.
Globally, the group closed 2025 with around 123 billion dollars in revenue, with R&D spending amounting to 21.8% of revenue and about 165,000 active patents.
The three-year plan has three concrete pillars: certifying over 10,000 engineers through the partner network, investing more than 20 million dollars annually in marketing, and making over 94% of the product catalog available to the channel, delegating over 90% of associated professional services, from installation to maintenance, to partners. This choice must be understood in a market where various suppliers are instead centralizing direct sales and reducing incentives for the channel: Huawei chooses the opposite direction, expanding the base and encouraging advancement to higher program tiers. Last year, over 170 European partners reached at least the Silver level, with the company estimating that 80 are ready for further promotion.
Incentives, Logistics, and Technological Offering
The channel program confirms rebates of up to 8% on sales and up to 10.5% on maintenance renewals. In 2025, the company distributed about 50 million in rebates to European partners. Additionally, there is a program for early registration of deals, which offers partners discounts ranging from 10-30% below the market average on opportunities reported in advance. The European base counts 5,000 partners, 8,000 certified engineers, and over 100 solutions developed with partners on vertical scenarios.
In operational terms, Leon Zhang, Director of European Enterprise Partner Development & Management at Huawei, highlighted logistics as a competitive leverage in a phase of strong supply chain tensions. The company reports having two logistics centers in Europe, 210 modules kept in stock, and deliveries within two weeks for about 90% of the portfolio. On storage, where the market struggles today to meet even eight-month wait times, declared delivery times stand at two months. This data alone is significant for customers planning AI projects amid a structural scarcity of flash memory.
On the technological front, the press session was led by Christophe Batiard, CTO of Western Europe at Huawei, and put AI at the center. The dominant theme was memory management in inference: Huawei presented the Unified Cache Manager and the AI Data platform, designed to host the inference cache produced by GPUs (the so-called KV cache), freeing up expensive memory on the accelerators and avoiding recalculating data that would otherwise be lost. Alongside this, the SuperPoD architecture and load balancing algorithms for AI fabric networks were introduced. On consumption, Huawei announced a direct liquid cooling system for data center switches, with an explicit motivation: according to the company's projections, without a change in course, AI risks consuming over 10% of global energy needs.
Focus on Vertical Markets in Italy and European Sovereignty Challenges
For Italy, Alexandre Grandeaux, CTO of Huawei Enterprise Italy, outlined a reorganization that took effect on January 1 and aligns with the continental strategy. The company has abandoned the structure based on technology and territory and reorganized by market verticals: central and local public administration, public and private healthcare, retail, hospitality, manufacturing, and finance. The commercial relationship remains indirect, with two national partners and two regional system integrators as main contacts. Technology priorities shift from sector to sector. In finance, high-capacity and low-latency optical interconnection between geographically distinct data centers is crucial. In public administration and healthcare, the main lever is the consolidation of infrastructure and virtualization, focusing on storage.
However, the European regulatory framework remains a concern. In the closing remarks, a consultant for the Italian government on AI adoption in the public sector noted that the compliance burden now weighs between 10% and 20% of European companies' margins, and that true competitive leverage lies in data portability and reuse, with server-to-server architectures still not widespread. For a Chinese supplier, the stakes remain delicate. Responding to a question from a journalist about security, Batiard observed that in Europe, Huawei does not serve the most sensitive segments and, on the contrary, registers a growing demand from customers interested in reducing dependence on US suppliers. This emerged as the most interesting contrast in Como: the discussion now centers not only on the perimeter of restrictions but also on the search for credible alternatives to VMware, Cisco, and the rest of the Western offering.