(Yicai) Feb. 27 -- Nearly 300 Chinese exhibitors, including telecom equipment giants Huawei Technologies and ZTE, are taking part in the Mobile World Congress, accounting for about 12 percent of this year’s total.

The MWC, which kicked off in Barcelona yesterday, is the world's biggest and most influential annual exhibition for the communications industry. Enhanced iterations of fifth-generation networks and artificial intelligence will be the main highlights of the four-day event.

Exhibits and talks at the MWC will focus on six themes, including 5G and Beyond, Connecting Everything, and Humanising AI, according to its website.

Huawei brings its complete 5.5G product and solutions lineup to the MWC and will release during the event its first large language model for the communications industry to help carriers make smart transitions quicker, the Shenzhen-based firm announced yesterday. 

Huawei has helped telecom carriers in more than 20 cities globally in fulfilling commercial-use verification and tests of 5G-Advanced Architecture, it noted. China's three major telcos, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, have also started deploying 5G-A in key cities in the Chinese mainland, it added. 

The number of global 5G users has topped 1.5 billion after commercial use began five years ago, reaching the level of 4G customers achieved in nine years, Li Peng, corporate senior vice president and president of Huawei Carrier Business, said at a summit held before the MWC 2024. 

5G customers accounted for 30 percent of network traffic and 40 percent of business income, though they only made up 20 percent of the total global mobile internet users, Li added. 

ZTE will highlight uSmartNet, its smart network solution integrating LLM and digital twin technology, during the event. It will drive sustained evolution of 5G-A, optical networks, computing power, energy, and terminal technologies, while further optimizing the efficiency of AI reasoning training and deployment costs in the future, President Xu Ziyang noted. 

Honor, the Chinese smartphone maker spun off from Huawei around three years ago, released its AI-empowered all-scenario strategy at the MWC 2024. According to Chief Executive Zhao Ming, the company hopes to improve the smartphone system’s ability to perceive scenarios, make decisions, and understand users through platform-level AI.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Martin Kadiev