Left to right: Dean Yu, President of Huawei Southern Africa Carrier Business Group, Wanda Matandela, CEO of MTN SA’s Enterprise Business Unit and Brian Xu, Huawei Cloud Core Sales and Marketing VP at the launch of the Connected Animal IoT solution in Cape Town
from MTHULISI SIBANDA in Cape Town
CAPE TOWN – MTN South Africa and Huawei Technologies have partnered to launch the Connected Animal solution, an Internet of Things (IoT) innovation aimed at solving the rampant problems of stock theft and rhino poaching.
Launched in Cape Town at AfricaCom, the continent’s largest
telecommunications, media and technology event, the MTN solution allows the livestock farmer improved animal management and health screening through activity and movement monitoring and analysis.
Farmers receive actionable insights and early warning information to make decisions that help them manage their livestock, better improving efficiency and reducing costs.
Wanda Matandela, Chief Executive Officer of MTN SA’s Enterprise Business Unit, said by using IoT, farmers have near real time visibility of their livestock, which acts as a deterrent to stock theft.
The solution would help farmers track straying animals.
“A similar wildlife tracking solution allows for the monitoring of our
precious rhino populations in our game parks, giving rangers better tools to fight poaching,” Matandela said.
Stock theft is one of South Africa’s most persistent crimes with about 400 000 domestic animals, valued at more than R1 billion (US$69 million) reported stolen between 2006 and 2010, according to SA Society for Animal Science.
Worryingly, over 500 rhino have been poached since the beginning of 2018.
Dean Yu, President of Huawei Southern Africa Carrier Business Group, said his company had leading technology, ecosystem and expertise on IoT business.
“We are working closely with local partners to help telcos quickly launch successful IoT businesses in China, Asia pacific and Europe. We are ready to utilize our experience and understanding of Africa market to working with telcos in Africa and to bring digital to every person, family and organizations in the continent,” Yu said.
Ntuthuko Shezi, founder and CEO of Livestock Wealth, is trialing the
Connected Animal solution.
He said the IoT innovation would help them build more trust in their business models with existing and prospecting investors.
“With such solution we can also expand the ecosystem of farmers to more areas and allow small scale and communal farmers to be incorporated into our value chain in an efficient way,” Shezi said.
Huawei and MTN have been working closely to solve a variety of social and business problems.
They co-launched AN Narrow-band (NB)-IoT strategy to solve low power and wide area coverage problems in 2016.
Last year (2017) MTN and Huawei launched the connected car solution to promote safe-driving and enable usage-based-insurance business model.
Elsewhere, Huawei has worked with China Telecom and Yinchuan Aotoso Information Technology on the NB-IoT product, UCOWS, hailed is a vast improvement over traditional cow monitoring systems.
Meanwhile, the IoT Forum hosted by Huawei at AfricaCom attracted industry leaders from different IoT value chain players, like smart device providers, connectivity providers, platform providers, vertical solution players, all the way to end customers, to discuss key success factors for IoT business.
Huawei participates in AfricaCom 2018, held under the theme “Building a Fully Connected, Intelligent World.”
– CAJ News
