This year's instalment of the Asia-Pacific Innovation Day was held today at the Waldorf Astoria in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. This year's theme, "Innovation Enables Asia-Pacific Digitisation", saw over 200 representatives from a wide range of backgrounds—government, industry and academia included—discuss innovative 5G technologies and applications, along with sustainable development, advanced technology and their visions of the future. 

5G is being heralded as the next great cornerstone of connected technology, with experts calling it the 4th industrial revolution and the catalyst that will bring concepts of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and cloud computing to reality. 

Speaking at the event, William Xu, Director of the Board and President of the Institute of Strategic Research at Huawei, said "5G is arriving at the right time. More specifically, 5G can provide wide coverage, large bandwidth and low latency on the basis of traditional connections. It can also provide slicing for different applications. This new feature makes it adaptable to a variety of complex industrial applications."

"With the new advancement of 5G, there will be many 5G-enabled applications that will change the world," he continued. 

At the event, China Mobile Sichuan—one of China's largest telecom operators—launched a 5G stereo-coverage network in partnership with Huawei. With a basic coverage layer and indoor coverage layer for high-value scenarios, Huawei has taken the opportunity to highlight several innovations in the seamless coverage of 5G, which the speakers at the event said would play a vital role in everything from medicine, urban transport, education, nature conservation and more. 

Currently, Huawei is at the forefront of 5G technology, having invested billions of dollars into research and development since 2009. In a decade, Huawei's strengths in R&D and their commitment to networking, connectivity and future technology has put them well in the lead behind European competitors, who are rumoured to be at least two to three years off the pace in implementing 5G. By comparison, Asia-Pacific is surging ahead—South Korea is the world's first country to realise large-scale commercial use of 5G since early April 2019. 

Since 2013, Innovation Days have been organised by Huawei in different cities including London, Milan, Munich, Paris, Bangkok, Dubai and Sao Paolo. Founded in 1987 and employing more than 180,000 employees, Huawei currently operates in more than 170 countries.