(Yicai Global) Jan. 14 -- Chinese telecom giant Huawei is making its Cloud & AI Business Unit one of its major business groups as it looks to play catch up with early players in the field.

Hou Jinlong, former president of cloud and artificial intelligence products and services, will be president of the new business group, according to an internal document seen by Yicai Global. The firm's other major business groups are its consumer, carrier and enterprise units.

Cloud services have been one of Huawei's key drivers in recent years as growth in its information and communication services has begun to slow, though the Shenzhen-based tech giant lags behind contemporaries like Alibaba, Microsoft and Amazon and is a second-tier player in China's cloud and AI sector.

Upgrading the status of the cloud business group is a major change for Huawei and a step toward the company's Cloud Only strategy, an insider at the firm told Yicai Global, adding that details for the plans remain to be finalized.

Huawei's Managing Director Wang Tao said at the Huawei Analyst Conference in April that the company aimed to integrate all of its resources, from chips and data centers to hardware, software and computing infrastructure, to make Huawei's cloud the only full-stack service in the country.

The firm has been making moves toward this goal since August 2017, when it divested its public cloud business from its corporate unit. At the end of 2019, it further restructured to optimize its infrastructure business and integrated its public and private cloud, big data, AI, computing, storage and Internet of Things services into the Cloud & AI Business Group.

Editor: James Boynton