Search
EN
Asia Pacific
Europe
Latin America
Middle East & Africa
While most distributors opt for mature markets, CETC Taili chose a less-traveled path to enter the digital power sector—partnering with Huawei Digital Power to launch its residential smart PV business. In the Chinese market, this represents a breakthrough into a brand-new business domain.
After establishing a residential smart PV business model, CETC Taili expanded its cooperation with Huawei Digital Power into the C&I market. This includes Huawei Digital Power's products and solutions such as PV inverters, grid-forming energy storage systems (ESSs), and charging facilities.
In the C&I PV business expansion, CETC Taili still adheres to its market breakthrough strategy. It creates showcases for specific application scenarios for clear demonstrations, as well as for replicating success to unlock new market opportunities.
As a pioneer and leader in the digital power market, Huawei is focused on value creation, tirelessly delivering high-quality products and pushing safety standards to the highest level. This has provided a solid foundation for CETC Taili's emergence in the digital power sector, enabling us to confidently explore new market opportunities.
Lou Peishu
Special Assistant to the General Manager of CETC Taili
and General Manager of the Digital Power Business Department
Founded in 1992, CETC Taili has specialized in marketing services for the smart terminal (IoT) business for over 30 years. By building three core platforms—a digital marketing platform, a supply chain assurance platform, and an industry collaboration platform—CETC Taili is transitioning from a traditional IoT distributor into a technology-driven supply chain service provider.
For more than two decades after its founding, CETC Taili primarily focused on acting as a distributor for both Chinese and international mobile phone brands in the Chinese market, spanning the eras of 2G, 3G, and 4G. Then in 2014, CETC Taili started to cooperate closely with Huawei and became a fulfillment distributor of Huawei's consumer business in the Chinese market. Since then, the cooperation between the two parties has continued to grow and strengthen.
Since 2019, CETC Taili has fully aligned its business with Huawei, expanding its product portfolio under cooperation from smartphones to eleven categories across Huawei's product lines. Its channel strategy also evolved from distribution to include experience stores and e-commerce, as well as enterprise and government channels.
In 2021, CETC Taili was incorporated into CETC, becoming a level-2 unit of the company. As a state-owned enterprise, CETC Taili is committed to taking on more responsibilities in driving advanced productive forces and actively seeking opportunities to invest in strategic emerging industries.
In the context of China's "dual carbon" goals—peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060—the digital power sector quickly emerged as a focus for CETC Taili. It was during this period that CETC Taili began its collaboration with Huawei Digital Power.
At the end of 2022, CETC Taili established contact with Huawei Digital Power, quickly reaching a cooperation agreement.
By that time, Huawei Digital Power had established a relatively comprehensive partner system. As a newcomer, CETC Taili did not choose a mature market, but became a Huawei Digital Power value-added partner (VAP) in the emerging residential smart PV market.
According to Lou Peishu, prior to this, residential PV systems in China were largely limited to rural homes. Among the country's 6 million urban villas, PV system coverage was virtually nonexistent, representing a blank space in the renewable energy market with significant growth potential. CETC Taili aimed to help Huawei Digital Power tap into this new market and build a new business model.
Despite recognizing the opportunity, they faced a slew of challenges in launching the new business. At that time, many doubted the viability of residential smart PV and thought that high-income villa owners would not care about the revenue brought by PV power generation. However, Huawei and CETC Taili remained confident in their vision and committed to full-scale investment. Together, they developed business rules and models, laid out a top-level design, and began seeking downstream partners to expand into the villa PV segment—a brand-new track.
In March 2023, Huawei Digital Power held the first Residential Smart PV Partner Conference in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, officially releasing Huawei's residential smart PV development strategy and one-fits-all residential smart PV solution for the villa market. This marked the beginning of a new chapter in the partnership between the two companies.
The residential smart PV market is an ecosystem consisting of owners, equipment vendors, service providers, and grid companies. Recognizing the characteristics of this market, CETC Taili has introduced a full-lifecycle service model that offers villa owners comprehensive support, from initial interest, procurement, and installation, to O&M.
According to Lou Peishu, residential smart PV has both B2B/B2C and investment/consumption attributes. From a B2B/B2C perspective, it follows a project development approach, yet the customers are individual villa owners. From an investment/consumption standpoint, villa owners make a one-off purchase, but the products also generate long-term investment returns, and the payback period is long.
To support this model, CETC Taili has invested in building service platforms such as the TImall, logistics and warehousing, and supply chain finance. With this as the foundation, the company actively develops sales and service partners to be responsible for customer acquisition and service delivery.
Throughout this process, the experience and resources accumulated by CETC Taili in the B2C business over the years played an important role. For example, its phone distribution channels span cities and counties, enabling rapid access to local users. Its tens of thousands of partners also become potential partners for the residential smart PV business.
In just two years, the scale of CETC Taili's residential smart PV business is expected to grow from CNY30 million in 2023 to more than CNY200 million in 2025.
Building on the success of the residential smart PV business, CETC Taili's cooperation with Huawei Digital Power has gradually extended to Digital Power's other products and solutions such as PV inverters, grid-forming ESSs, and charging facilities, allowing the company to achieve outstanding results in the C&I PV market.
As a VAP of Huawei Digital Power in Henan, Hunan, and other provinces, CETC Taili is making efforts to find, select, and develop C&I PV distributors. Based on its highly standardized services and actual business requirements, CETC Taili is looking to work with top distributors in the industry and fostering distributors in the C&I sector, with the aim of further expanding the C&I channel coverage to the city and county levels.
CETC Taili is also continuously expanding C&I customer projects, bringing more new market opportunities to the Huawei C&I PV business. In the C&I ESS field, CETC Taili is committed to building a showcase for each scenario, such as adding ESSs to existing plants and providing a generation-grid-load-storage synergy platform for energyintensive enterprises. After achieving breakthroughs in showcase projects, demonstrations are provided to support replication and promotion across the province.
Lou Peishu noted that as a pioneer and leader in the digital power sector, Huawei provided unwavering support during the expansion into the new market, which was of vital importance to the company. In particular, the two parties' dedication and perseverance in the face of difficulties and challenges were truly commendable. He was also impressed by Huawei's unremitting pursuit of high quality. For example, Huawei achieved the ultimate safety of its products while adhering to high standards and strict requirements for technical specifications.
Currently, the total cooperation scale of Huawei's business with CETC Taili has exceeded CNY500 billion, and CETC Taili has established digital distribution capabilities covering most of Huawei's businesses. Although the digital power business accounts for a small proportion of the total revenue, Lou Peishu values its demonstration of new products, new sectors, and new business models.
With the development of new businesses, CETC Taili is constantly breaking boundaries, powering the second growth curve of Huawei's business, and accelerating its transition to a technology-oriented supply chain service provider.
Lou Peishu refers to this transition as distribution 2.0. Compared with the game of interests in the distribution 1.0 era, in the distribution 2.0 era, distributors and vendors engage in long-term cooperation based on complementary values—each focusing on doing what they are best at to achieve collaborative development.
Finally, Lou Peishu emphasized the "two persistences" strategies of CETC Taili on Huawei Digital Power: persistence in selling only Huawei's products and persistence in comprehensive resource investment. In the future, he hopes to cooperate more deeply and broadly with Huawei Digital Power. After achieving this market breakthrough, he hopes to expand the scale further and contribute to the healthy development of the entire digital power industry.
This is not only a win-win for CETC Taili and Huawei Digital Power, but also an important step in the growing maturity of the digital power industry.
