In April 2026 I was at Lake Como for Huawei’s Benelux & Ireland Partner Summit 2026. The welcome banner at the entrance said exactly that, and Huawei’s own 2026 event calendar (more on that below) listed the summit on 15–17 April in Italy. This post covers the strategy session on the afternoon of 15 April. I’ve already published three posts from Huawei Summit 2026 as separate deep dives, linked at the end. This is the overview that ties them together.
A full room for the strategy session.
The 2026 Key Strategy keynote
The session was “2026 Key Strategy”, presented by Terry Dong, Enterprise General Manager. The core of it was what Huawei Enterprise wants to focus on this year, and what it offers partners in return.
Terry Dong opening the 2026 Key Strategy session.
The “Huawei Enterprise 2026 Strategy” slide split the plan into three areas:
- Industry Focus: four target sectors (Education, Healthcare, MSP/ISP and Government), worked through industry events, account mapping, industry solutions and reference sharing.
- Partner Focus: deal registration, demo incentives, capability training and proof-of-concept (POC) support.
- Marketing Focus: IT media exposure, joint events and social media posts.
My take: for an integrator, deal registration and POC support matter most on that list. They decide whether a partner can afford to put engineering time into a pilot before the customer signs. Picking education, healthcare, MSP/ISP and government also makes sense. These sectors buy campus networks, Wi-Fi and storage in volume, and they often have small IT teams.
eKit: “4+10+N” for SMEs
The other slide on screen around the opening of the keynote was HUAWEI eKit, billed as “4+10+N” One-Stop Scenario-Based Solutions for SMEs. The slide had four scenario tiles:
- Intelligent Office: startup workspace and SME office
- Intelligent Business: intelligent hotel, store and mall
- Intelligent Education: intelligent campus network and interactive classroom
- Intelligent Healthcare: digital diagnosis platform, smart consultation room and smart ward
The eKit slide: four scenarios at the top, the hardware range in the middle, management at the bottom.
Below the tiles was the hardware range: switches, several access point form factors (settled, high-density, wall plate and outdoor), a Wi-Fi 7 gateway, router, firewall, Mini FTTO gateway and AP, IdeaHub and IdeaHub Mini, storage and SSD. At the bottom was the operations layer: unified selection, deployment and O&M, the eKit App, the eKit.huawei.com portal, and a cloud management platform covering SME network, OptiX, IdeaHub and storage cloud.
My take: the bundling is the point. SMEs don’t want to design a network. They want a known-good kit for “a small office” or “a shop” that a local partner can deploy and manage remotely. The cloud management layer is what lets a partner run that model at a profit.
Storage and Wi-Fi in the same deck
The keynote then moved on to two product announcements, which I covered in detail at the time:
- The Storm Shield Program for OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, whose slide promised rapid delivery in 4–6 weeks. See Huawei Storage Storm Shield: OceanStor Dorado.
- “Pay for Wi-Fi 7, Enjoy the Wi-Fi 8 Experience”, the pre Wi-Fi 8 AirEngine lineup including the AirEngine 8776I-X6ETHP-T outdoor AP. See Huawei Wi-Fi 7 AirEngine: Pay for Wi-Fi 7, Get Wi-Fi 8.
“What Happens NEXT”, with the footer line “Creating the Future of Industrial Intelligence – Together.”
2026 goals for the Benelux and Ireland partner business
Before the awards, a slide titled “Together with your support we are confident to achieve our target in 2026” set out the goals for the region. As shown: active partners from 308 to 350, Gold and Silver partners from 13 to 16, partner revenue from 30M to 36M, incentive from 2.3M to 3M and a 30% year-on-year revenue increase. The slide gives no currency or baseline year, so I only quote the numbers as shown.
The 2026 goals slide from the 15 April session.
The 2026 partner event calendar
The last slide I photographed was “Diverse Marketing Activities”: a 2026 event calendar for Huawei’s multi-country enterprise business, colour-coded as Huawei events, industry events, partner events and China visits. Among the entries I could read: MWC26 in March, an edu/healthcare China visit from 30 March to 3 April, this Partner Summit on 15–17 April, a Huawei storage user event in Belgium on 30 April, the 9th Benelux & Ireland Field Engineer Club in May, Huawei Connect in Shanghai on 17–19 September, Huawei Connect EU in October and a 10th Field Engineer Club in the Netherlands in November.
The 2026 calendar: Huawei events, joint partner events and industry events across the year.
16 April: the Huawei European Partner Conference
The next day moved to a larger hall at Lake Como. The signage read “Advancing Together, Integrating Intelligence”, Huawei European Partner Conference 2026, with the line “Building a Fully Connected, Intelligent World”. Names below are only those shown on screen. The Mayor of Como, Alessandro Rapinese, was introduced on a slide, and a slide introduced Leon Zhang, Director of European Enterprise Partner Development & Management at Huawei, before a run of slides titled “Huawei Enterprise Business & Partner Strategy”. Later a slide introduced Xia Xingchang, Vice President of European Enterprise Business at Huawei.
Two figures slides set the scene. The first, “Huawei Global: 2025 Business Performance in Line with Forecasts”, showed 2025 corporate revenue of CNY880.9 Bn and, among the progress points, 60Mn 5G-A users, more than 7Mn developers and 9,800+ ISV partners for Kunpeng and Ascend, HarmonyOS installations at the 36Mn mark, and 34 Huawei Cloud regions with 101 availability zones. These are Huawei’s own marketing figures, so treat them as claims.
The global performance slide: revenue chart on the left, key business progress on the right.
The second was “Year 2025, Update the progress of Partner business” under the heading Double Digital Growth for European enterprise revenue. It listed 5000+ active partners, eKit business up 100%, partner-led business from 25% to 43%, 98% of delivery and service done by partners, more than 90% of business from partners, rebate of 50M+ (up 20%), 17M marketing investment (up 13%), 8.3k certificates (up 1K) and 200+ “golden seeds”. As with the 2026 goals, the slide gives no currency.
The 2025 partner business slide, with the Open and Win-Win captions at the bottom.
My take: the most useful number for an integrator is the partner-led share (25% to 43%) together with the 98% of delivery and service done by partners. It says where Huawei expects partners to carry the work.
In the late afternoon a retail talk showed “The Connected & AI-native Store”, with text on screen saying that Vusion and Huawei are already powering 6,000+ stores together. In the evening, a slide titled “2025 European Top Service Partner” listed award winners from Italy, the Czech Republic, Portugal and France.
“The Connected & AI-native Store” slide from the retail talk.
