Huawei, a leading global ICT solutions provider, has today announced it is to invest £10million to support technology research programmes with world-renowned British universities. The funding, part of Huawei's previously announced US$2 billion investment commitment to the UK, will be implemented by 2017 and strengthens the company’s partnership with British higher education.
 
The £10m investment includes key collaborations with the major British universities, with the research programmes focusing on advanced multimedia, IT and optical technology, green radio, 5G technologies, optical technology, wireless communications and product engineering.
 
The significant level of funding for these university schemes has been made available through Huawei’s Innovation Research Programme, which extends the company’s long-term focus on research and development into the academic world by forging partnerships with global educational institutions. Every year Huawei invests over 10% of its revenue into R&D, in 2012 this equaled to US$4.8 billion.
 
It is expected that the research programmes will help significantly increase Huawei’s understanding of these cutting-edge technologies and thereby improve the consumer, network and enterprise services and solutions it offers. Huawei already counts BT and EE among its network customers in the UK and is currently the world’s third-largest smartphone vendor.
 
The £10m investment also builds on Huawei’s existing investment into the UK’s education system. Since 2011 the company has worked with the UK Government to fund an undergraduate exchange programme that enables students to visit China for five weeks, spending two weeks in Beijing to understand the culture and three weeks in Shenzhen, where Huawei is headquartered, to experience working life. This year 18 students took part in the programme and Huawei’s objective is to increase this to 50 per year from UK universities, by 2017.