BRICS Future Network Innovation Forum was held on August 5-9, in China. The Minister of Communications and Information Technology Amr Talaat has visited China, heading a high-level delegation, to participate in the Forum.
Talaat delivered a speech during the Forum, where he said that Egypt is keen on leveraging the Fourth Industrial Revolution opportunities to achieve comprehensive development, underlining the efforts of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) to keep abreast of the global technological developments.
On the sidelines of the Forum, the ICT Minister met with a number of senior officials, ministers, and representatives of major Chinese ICT companies, where they discussed enhancing cooperation and sharing views on a number of topics of common interest.
The ICT Minister met with the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Houlin Zhao. They discussed means of cooperation between MCIT and ITU, and the arrangements of hosting the World Radiocommunication Conference 2019 (WRC-19) in Sharm El Sheikh in October 2019.
In addition, Talaat witnessed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) and Jusfoun Big Data Information Group Co., Ltd., to establish an office for the company in Egypt, including a Center of Excellence (CoE).
Talaat, also, witnessed the signing of an MoU between ITIDA and iFlytek, on cooperation in AI, in terms of capacity building, skills development, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and human speech recognition techniques.
Furthermore, Talaat witnessed the signing of an MoU between Telecom Egypt (TE) and ZTE Chinese company on establishing an innovation lab and a technology training center. He, also, met with ZTE Chairman Li Zixue.
The ICT Minister, also, witnessed the signing of an MoU between TE and China Telecom on cooperation for transferring knowledge in a number of areas, including customer service, installing fiber optic cables to homes, namely Fiber to the Home (FTTH), and providing Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services.
He, also, visited the company and took a tour in its exhibition.
Moreover, Talaat witnessed the signing of an agreement between TE and Huawei, on providing modern communication use models, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications. He, also, met with Huawei officials headed by Executive Director David Wang.
The ICT Minister, in addition, met with representatives of Chinese companies specializing in electronics feeding industries. They discussed establishing an industrial cluster in Egypt through an alliance including a number of Chinese companies, with the aim to create an integrated system for electronics feeding industries, such as television screens, mobile phones, and tablets.
Talaat, also, met with Xiaomi Vice President Alex Xing, and Head of Global Public Affairs Lancelot Liu, at Xiaomi headquarters in Beijing. They discussed the company’s expansion and investment in Egypt.
Furthermore, Talaat met with the Dean of School of Electronics and Information Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) Gao Qing. They discussed exchanging expertise on the best practices in designing training programs, and cooperation in capacity building.
BRICS is the association of five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They are important markets and exporters of ICT products. The decision to hold an ICT forum for BRICS countries aims at sharing ideas, best practices and capacity building in the ICT sector.
