Huawei’s chairman Xu Zhijun – aka Eric Xu – has called out China’s enormous lead in fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations.

Speaking at last week’s Mobile World Congress event in Shanghai, Xu shared his views on the telecommunications industry’s future growth opportunities and said by the end of 2025 China will be home to 75 million FTTR installations – but just 500,000 exist outside the Middle Kingdom.

Xu said FTTR will benefit businesses by increasing their internet connection speeds, helping them address spotty Wi-Fi coverage, allowing them to deploy tech in more places, and therefore creating more opportunities to adopt productivity-boosting devices and services. FTTR will also help carriers to sell more expensive packages, he said.

Huawei’s chair also wants carriers to think about delivery riders and influencers.

Xu said delivery riders matter because by the year 2030 five percent of the working population – or 160 million people – will be employed in the field. In China, delivery riders call the recipient of every consignment and that means they spend 800 minutes a month making voice calls – four times the average. The chair also observed that delivery riders kill time between gigs watching short videos on their mobile devices and therefore consume twice as much data as average users. They pay for the privilege and deliver 1.6 times the average revenue per user.

Huawei’s chair spotted another lucrative market for carriers to target, namely the 130 million people he thinks will conduct “livestreams” – infomercials hosted by influencers – because their data usage is five times higher than the average and they generate four times more revenue for carriers than regular users.

Xu thinks catering to livestreamers and delivery riders - and other emerging classes of users, including those who adopt new classes of device like smart glasses -is the way for carriers to grow.

He also wants China’s mobile carriers and web platform operators to work together to get more high-resolution videos onto mobile networks so both can profit from higher user engagement. The chair also called on networking equipment vendors to make their kit cheaper to operate, and for device makers to improve power consumption so users can stream more video more often.

The chair also wants every car to connect over 5G.

Xu said Huawei is here to help carriers deliver any of the scenarios he mentioned. And of course it is, because the Chinese giant has a thriving business selling to telcos – or at least to telcos beyond the liberal democracies that have largely decided Huawei’s close ties with Beijing mean the company and its products represent an unacceptable threat to the operation of critical infrastructure.

Huawei's board chairs occasionally make big speeches of this sort, because the company appoints a pool of three deputies who each spend three months in the top job before standing down. Xu started his more recent stint in the job on April 1st, 2025. ®