Lumen Technologies targeting key markets in APAC for growth

There are three different sets of solutions that Lumen brings to the market in the region, says Wai Kit Cheah, Senior Director, Products and Solutions at Lumen Technologies APAC.

For Lumen Technologies, the Asia Pacific region may be key towards growth and success. At a recent Q1 2025 earnings call, Lumen beat Wall Street’s expectations with reported total revenue of US$3.18 billion, which represented a decline of 3.3 percent compared to US$3.29 billion in the year-ago period.

The company reported a net loss of US$201 million for its most recent quarter, compared to net income of US$57 million for the same period a year before. Interestingly, things are looking rather different in the APAC region.

According to Wai Kit Cheah, Senior Director, Products and Solutions at Lumen Technologies APAC, there are three different sets of solutions that Lumen brings to the market.

“Primarily the network services that we do, it is similar to what we have as part of our portfolio in the US. We help connect data, applications, people for enterprises be it local, regional enterprises as well as for global MNCs that have requirements here. And I think that is a very growing market. We serve a lot of the MNCs and it actually continues to be a growth engine for us,” explained Cheah in an interview with CRN Asia at GITEX Asia.

Besides that, Cheah said there are other two other pillars. One is on infrastructure and cloud services, which Lumen is expanding, both geographically as well as in its portfolio of offerings.

“We are tailoring the solutions to address what is the market demand in terms of connecting workloads, hyperscalers as well as in terms of managing the complexity of those cloud environments for our enterprise clients,” said Cheah.

The third pillar is cybersecurity because Lumen transports data for clients and manages client workloads, applications and infrastructure. For Cheah, securing it is one of the fundamental essential parts of that equation because without that security, there is potentially a lot of risk that clients are exposed to.

“All in all, we see three different pillars and three of them are growing at a different trajectory. And we are expanding that to whether direct or indirect channels. Our key markets are Singapore, Japan, Australia and North Asia. Japan is also our highest growth market,” added Cheah.

Collaboration with partners

As Lumen Technologies looks to grow its wallet share in the market in APAC, its partner ecosystem is key to achieve this. Lumen currently partners several hyperscalers, including Alibaba Cloud in the region.

“We are hoping to do a lot more with partners such as Alibaba Cloud. While they are the infrastructure engine, we are the service provider that helps to ensure that the clients and enterprises that use those infrastructures use it effectively, efficiently, in the best possible manner. So, we are hoping to expand that,” said Cheah.

With Alibaba Cloud, Lumen helps enterprises to migrate workloads into Alibaba Cloud. This includes providing day one services and day two managed services as well. Lumen also embeds the day two managed services, as it is a continuous improvement framework where Lumen can look at areas for optimization, reducing wastage, improving ROI and then securing those environments on Alibaba Cloud.

“We are also a partner of AWS and of course Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. We offer services to help modernize workloads for clients on this, manage the day-to-day operations for clients on these environments, as well as to optimize and continuously help to enhance the ROI that these enterprises are looking for when they move to these public cloud services. And then besides that, we also have strategic alliance partners like Fortinet that we use to support our cybersecurity services and other needs,” explained Cheah.

Cheah also mentioned that Lumen has partnerships where they can collaborate on a direct channel. So, for example, with IBM Consulting, Cheah explained that there are certain areas where they have a gap in terms of competencies.

“We would fit in and where we are able to fit in and provide services such as managed infrastructure services to complement what IBM Consulting do in the market,” explained Cheah.

Lumen has also just announced a new collaboration with IBM to develop enterprise-grade AI solutions at the edge by integrating watsonx, IBM’s portfolio of AI products, with Lumen’s Edge Cloud infrastructure and network. The collaboration aims to solve contemporary business challenges by turning AI potential into practical, high-impact outcomes at the edge. For enterprise businesses, this can mean faster insights, lower operational costs, and a smarter path to digital innovation.

For Cheah, the partnership ecosystem allows Lumen to have an extension where it can build upon its capabilities to be a lot more valuable.

For the remaining of 2025, Cheah highlighted that Lumen will be looking to expand its footprint across key and emerging markets as well as grow the cybersecurity install base, cloud and infrastructure install base beyond networking.

“We want to grow the other two components to at least reach an equilibrium where we have a lot more play with each of our enterprises beyond just connectivity. So, in cybersecurity, it's predominantly anchored around an advanced, managed, extended threat detection and response service. And then, everything else is complementary. One thing that we do uniquely is that Lumen often complements threat detection response with advisory consulting. That's the proactive part. We want to help clients to pre-empt and prevent risk before it actually happens by analyzing their threat landscape, their environment, behavioral patterns so that we can improve their security posture continuously,” concluded Cheah.