JOHANNESBURG, Oct 24 (Reuters) – Huawei HWT.UL Cloud’s business in South Africa has grown fast over the past five years and it plans to launch more cloud solutions to expand market share to boost revenue, a company executive said on Thursday.

Increased demand for faster computing from South African firms and the government has attracted big cloud operators into the country, with Huawei the first international vendor to host a local ‘hyperscale’ cloud data centre in South Africa in 2019.

Huawei Cloud has served more than 1,000 customers from the government, financial services, education and telecoms sectors as well as some media and e-commerce companies, Jacqueline Shi, president of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service told delegates at the company’s cloud summit in Johannesburg.

“With this kind of strong support from different customers, our cloud business in South Africa has increased more than 16 times over the past five years,” Shi said.

She told reporters that the total revenue amount “is still not so big”, which has encouraged the company to launch more cloud solutions and capture a larger share of the country’s market.

The cloud market in South Africa is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of around 26% between 2023 and 2028 to 113 billion rand ($6 billion) in value, according to market research company Africa Analysis.

The adoption of artificial intelligence is also driving spending by corporate customers.

“Go to cloud or not, is not an option anymore. The question is how far and how to do it quickly,” Huawei Cloud South Africa Chief Executive Steven Chen told reporters.

The Chinese tech giant, which is going head-to-head with cloud services rivals Microsoft MSFT.O, Amazon AMZN.O and Alphabet’s GOOGL.O Google for customers in South Africa, has three data centre zones or locations in Johannesburg.

($1 = 17.6962 rand)

(Reporting by Nqobile Dludla; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)