Cisco regularly publishes its Visual Networking Index and Ericsson does likewise with its Mobility Report -- both are well-regarded across the industry for their primary data and forecasts. Huawei is doing the same with its Global Connectivity Index, which is now in its fifth annual edition.
Huawei's Global Connectivity Index provides a big picture look at digital transformation and presents its data on a country-by-country basis.
This year, the GCI report provides a quantitative assessment of the digital health of 79 nations, ranking them by considering their progress in 5 technology enablers: broadband, data centers, cloud, Big Data, and IoT. There are four pillars: supply, demand, experience and potential. The study relies on expertise from inside of Huawei as well as outside the company, including in-depth interviews with top think tanks around the world, including digital strategy advisors, digital economy academics, and policymakers from the World Bank, MIT, Stanford University, and Singapore Infocomm Development Authority. Huawei argues that the long-term return on investment (ROI) for digital technologies is 6.7 times that of non-digital investments.
The biggest takeaway from the study is that the global digital economy could nearly double in size to $23 trillion by 2025 from $12.9 trillion in 2017, when it accounted for 17.1% of global GDP.
One outside observation is that a country's connectivity ranking is related to its GDP but not bound by it. Another is that Huawei's own remarkable performance in certain developing countries must certainly have helped to list their ranking but often not enough to push them into front-runner or even adopter status -- and for the U.S. market, which holds the No.1 spot on Huawei's Global Connectivity Index, the company is essentially locked out.
Some highlights:
- The U.S. continued to lead in ICT Infrastructure investment and held onto its top position in the rankings.
- Singapore and Sweden trailed close behind the US, and over the past year closed the gap in rank with the US by two GCI points each.
- Qatar, China and Malaysia improved their GCI scores in part due to roll-outs of national ICT initiatives.
- The study identifies several countries seeing a drop in GCI rankings, mostly these nations are not yet investing, adopting and capturing the potential of advanced technologies including Cloud, Big Data and IoT.
- The study finds growing inequality, an ICT version of the “Matthew Effect” – the sociology theory that states: “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
Huawei's Global Connectivity Index can be accessed here:
http://www.huawei.com/minisite/gci/en/
