Welcome to Huawei's GCI 2020
Shaping the New Normal with Intelligent Connectivity



Mapping your transformation into a digital economy with GCI 2020
View Data
View Insights
Latest Related Publication
Digital Spillover

Measuring the true impact of the digital economy
Latest Related Publication
Sustainability Report 2019

Accelerating Sustainable Development Goals through ICT
Country Rankings

The GCI annually ranks 79 nations along an S-curve graph based on their latest GCI scores. According to ICT investment, ICT maturity, and digital economic performance, the S-curve groups nations into three clusters: Starters, Adopters, and Frontrunners. Since 2019, we had expanded the GCI’s research methodology to help policymakers understand AI’s growing influence on the global economy.

Digital Economy Journey:
The GCI S-Curve
Placing GCI with GDP

The GCI S-curve shows the digital economy journey of nations through the relationship between GCI score and GDP. Big investors in ICT infrastructure at the top of the S-curve should also show significantly stronger GDP per capita than those at the bottom of the S-curve.

Nations need to ensure adequate investment in and development of the four core technologies covered by GCI scoring – Broadband, Cloud, IoT and AI – and measured by 40 GCI indicators.

Starters are narrowing the gap with the leading economies thanks to improvements in broadband coverage and affordability.
Some starters are proactively catching up with the other clusters. Over the last 5 years Starters increased their mobile broadband adoption by over 2.5X with several countries having close to 100% coverage. The mobile broadband affordability as measured by the cost of mobile broadband divided by GNI per capita have also dropped by 25% (more affordable). These increased internet access have opened up new economic opportunities causing e-Commerce spending to almost double since 2014 to 2019. Some Starters were moving up the GCI cluster, increased their GCI scores by up to 17%, and managed to raise GDP to a level that was 22% higher than some peers. Vietnam and Peru have both become Adopter economies in 2020.
Organizations in Frontrunner countries want to maintain IT expenditure
Research shows that the willingness of companies to invest in IT varies depending on where they are based. Organizations in Frontrunner and Adopter nations are prioritizing maintaining their IT budgets over non-IT budgets. They have also cut their IT budgets by 2.5 to 3.5 times less than organizations in other countries on average. Nations with more mature digital infrastructure are better positioned to minimize the economic impact of the pandemic, recover faster, and ensure the continuity of their transformation into higher-order productivity models.
Economies with higher ICT maturity can drivedigital transformation to respond quicker to the COVID-19 pandemic, mitigating the negative impact on GDP per capita by 50%.
Organizations in economies with higher GCI scores are able to react faster to the COVID-19 pandemic and use digital tools and services to mitigate the impact of lockdowns and social distancing. Dueto the availability of high-speed broadband, cloud services, AI, and IoT solutions, they can quickly implement distributed workforce models, migrate to e-commerce platforms, and digitally transform their operations to maintain business continuity. The forecast decline in their GDP per capita is about 50% lower than for emerging GCI economies.
GCI 2020 Insights
Advanced factor endowments play a greater role in conferring competitive advantages in the new normal. Digital technologies accelerate the development of advanced factors for increasing economic competitiveness and recovery


Investing in ICT helps industries digitalize and enables economies to increase their order of productivity


ICT maturity takes industry digital transformation through five stages of productivity: task efficiency, functional efficiency, system efficiency, organizational efficiency and agility, and ecosystem efficiency and resilience.


Industry Impact
Technology convergence will fuel the next wave of GDP growth

The future isn’t guaranteed and change is never easy. It will take investment, infrastructure, and data. It will take determination and forethought. And it will take an understanding of how to plan ICT strategies based on the convergence of emerging technologies.