Chinese Information Technology and smartphone company, Huawei, announced that it plans to invest $10 million to enhance its presence in the Zimbabwean market.

According to company officials the new investment would be used to expand operations, beef up staff and pay for a new office complex.

More investments have now been lined up for the current year Huawei managing director, Wen Mingxuan stated at the launch of the company’s roadshow campaign in Harare yesterday.

Huawei is taking its products, which include smartphones, tablets, telecommunications equipment and enterprise IT solutions, to the wider Zimbabwean audience through roadshows running until the end of this week.

“We are the biggest network vendor in Zimbabwe having partnered with Net One, Telecel, TelOne, Africom, Econet and Liquid Telecom,” said Mingxuan.

“We have close to 100 employees in Zimbabwe. Our target is to double our staffing levels this year,” he said.

Johnson Yangsen, an executive with Huawei added that the company will showcase its new "LTE Backhaul architecture evolution which includes... best small router, as well as our EBAND outdoor microwave" as well as the non line of sight microwave (NLOS) solutions.

"We will introduce the innovative SoftMobile solution in the radio access which is a future proof deployment for 10 years evolution, and we will showcase our latest innovations in the wireless field such as the blade RRU, Adaptive Antenna Unit (AAU), AtomCell, Lampsite, Cloud BBU, Single Radio Controller (SRC) etc," said Yangsen.

Ngonidzashe Magwendeza, the company’s representative in Zimbabwe, told journalists that the company’s smartphone division was doing well in that market.

However, he admitted that the company was facing growing competition from other suppliers although the company’s pricing model made it the preferred choice.

“The business is doing well; you can see there is now even a budget for marketing. Initially, it was just research and development for the Zimbabwean market but now we are set for exciting times,” Magwendeza said.

In 2013, Huawei set-up a support centre in Harare to service its products. Other IT companies with support and back up in Zimbabwe include Apple while Econet, Telecel Zimbabwe and NetOne also provide minor support services for most cellphone brands.