People who left Huawei

Ren Zhengfei has said on many occasions that Huawei's cadre policy is "Prime ministers must be selected from prefectures and counties, and brave generals must be selected from the ranks of soldiers."

What he called cadres mainly refers to managers. Huawei employees are mainly divided into three categories: cadres, experts and staff. In other words, all managers in Huawei must have successful practical experience, especially those selected and promoted from the front line of business.

At the same time, Ren Zhengfei advocated that decisions should be made by those who can hear the gunfire. Through competition and training in the global market, Huawei has accumulated a large number of talents. However, like many large technology and Internet companies, Huawei has some people who yearn for it and some who choose to leave.

On May 23, multiple media reported that Wang Chenglu, known as the "Father of Hongmeng", resigned from Huawei. This news was confirmed by Huawei.

Wang Chenglu can be said to be an old Huawei employee. He has been with Huawei for 24 years and led the development of Huawei's Hongmeng system. He has served as the president of Huawei's consumer business software department. His external position before leaving was the president of Huawei's consumer business AI and smart full-scene business department.

Although Huawei started out as a hardware company, software is becoming increasingly important to Huawei.

In September 2021, Ren Zhengfei admitted at a symposium within Huawei that "software will devour everything in the future, which means that the core of the digital infrastructure of the future information society is software."

Before Wang Chenglu, Su Jing, president of Huawei's intelligent driving product line, resigned in January 2022. During his tenure, he launched Huawei's autonomous driving system solution ADS. Before leaving Huawei, Su Jing was dismissed for his remarks on autonomous driving in public.

In addition to Su Jing, Cai Jianyong, general manager of the intelligent vehicle control field of Huawei's Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU, and Chen Qi, founder of Huawei's autonomous driving team and director of the autonomous driving R&D department, also resigned one after another.

Of course, as people come in, people leave. It is normal for talents to circulate in the industry, especially in emerging sub-sectors and industries, such as autonomous driving and car manufacturing. Ren Zhengfei also said that we should dare to attract the best talents in the world. "Don't overemphasize professionalism. As long as he is good enough, he is willing to take the "scalpel" to join our "pig-killing" battle."

In fact, many entrepreneurs have also emerged from Huawei, such as Huang Wang, founder of Huami Technology, Chen Xiangyu, founder of Chuangmeng Tiandi, Ji Xinhua, founder of UCloud, and Li Yinan, founder of Niu Electric.

Tenggu Venture Capital analyzed in the "Huawei Entrepreneurship Heroes List" that, unlike entrepreneurs from Tencent and Alibaba, Huawei entrepreneurs are usually low-key, introverted, pragmatic, and deeply engaged in a certain vertical field.

From this perspective, those who left Huawei also brought Huawei's genes to more industries and enterprises.

Wang Chenglu joined Huawei in 1998, and became better known to the outside world after he entered the Consumer BG.

It was 2015. Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's Consumer BG, called Wang Chenglu and invited him to the consumer business to be responsible for the research and development of terminal software, which made Wang Chenglu "both excited and nervous."

Wang Chenglu once wrote an article recalling that he was excited because he started working on software-related work right after joining Huawei. In his opinion, completing large-scale industrial software development is like designing and building a magnificent palace using the 0s and 1s in the virtual world as building materials. But he also felt a little guilty. Although he had done software development before, it was mainly telecommunications equipment software, which is completely different from mobile phone operating systems. For example, the degree of standardization is different, and the target groups are also different, one is the B-end and the other is the C-end.

In the field of mobile phone operating systems, after the trials and tribulations, only Android and Apple's iOS are left. You can imagine how difficult it is.

In fact, Wang Chenglu is not a computer science major. His university major was metal matrix composite materials. When he joined Huawei, he first worked in the wireless core network department of the wireless product line, and later became the president of the core network product line and the president of the Central Software Institute.

Former Huawei Consumer Business AI and Smart Full Scenarios

Business Department President Wang Chenglu

Wang Chenglu made up for his shortcomings by self-study. He knew that his major had little to do with the communications industry where Huawei was located, and he had not even come across many professional terms.

In a conversation with Jiang Tao, founder and chairman of CSDN and founding partner of Geek Gang Venture Capital, he mentioned, "During that time, I read books until after 12 o'clock almost every night to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of communications, and constantly improved myself by reading protocols and looking at the code of the entire system. In less than a year, I had a very good understanding of the entire communication system."

Perhaps it was this learning ability and spirit of breakthrough that Yu Chengdong saw in Wang Chenglu, who became the president of the consumer business software department. The key step for him to prove himself was to solve the problem of mobile phone freezing under the Android system.

In his article "Let Software Become the Hard Power of Huawei Mobile Phones", Wang Chenglu described it as "changing engines on the fly" and came up with five major "prescriptions", among which artificial intelligence is the core, which intelligently analyzes the application side and determines the resource demand characteristics of the application; on the hardware resource side, it perceives the status of resources such as CPU, memory, IO (Input/Output), storage, etc., and uses AI algorithms to achieve the best match between application requirements and hardware resources, and timely and reasonably organizes and recycles idle resources to solve the problems of hardware resource coordination and excessive expansion of APP space.

Wang Chenglu's biggest concern is to develop an operating system. He had this idea when he was still at Huawei's Central Software Institute, but the conditions in his department were insufficient and immature at the time. In May 2016, Hongmeng was officially launched, and Wang Chenglu wanted to develop a distributed IoT operating system that can collaborate with multiple devices.

At that time, Yu Chengdong believed that the technical direction was good, but it was too difficult to implement, especially the soft bus was too challenging.

Substantial changes occurred in early 2018. Wang Chenglu said in a conversation with LatePost that Ren Zhengfei wanted to learn more about what each department of the Consumer BG had done because the growth was too fast and he was worried about big risks or problems, so he asked each business to report on its business. Wang Chenglu took this opportunity to report his idea of ​​developing an operating system, which was recognized by Ren Zhengfei.

"I said, 'Mr. Ren, can we install our system on various devices in the future?' He said yes, and encouraged us to install it on cars and TVs," Wang Chenglu recalled.

Since then, HarmonyOS has entered the fast lane. In August 2019, the HarmonyOS system was officially unveiled to the public and put into use on Huawei Smart Screen. In the following year, HarmonyOS 2 was released for mobile phones, and a mobile developer Beta version was launched. In June 2021, the HarmonyOS operating system began to be promoted and applied on Huawei mobile phones.

Previously, according to Huawei's goal, Hongmeng will reach 300 million units in 2021, and the market share will exceed 16%. This is a life-and-death line, which means that the Hongmeng ecosystem is basically successful. On April 28, Yu Chengdong revealed at Huawei's new product launch conference that as of now, the shipment volume of Huawei devices equipped with Hongmeng HarmonyOS has exceeded 240 million units, and the shipment volume of Hongmeng ecosystem devices has exceeded 150 million units during the same period.

However, the outside world has always had doubts about Hongmeng, believing that it is just a shell of Android.

Wang Chenglu once responded that it is normal for people not to understand something, especially when it comes to something as complex and challenging as operating systems.

Wang Chenglu's new destination is still closely related to Huawei.

Multiple sources indicate that Wang Chenglu will join Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the Shenzhen State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, and is invested by Beijing Chinasoft International Information Technology Co., Ltd. and Huawei's wholly-owned Habo Technology Venture Capital. Chinasoft International also has many collaborations with Huawei.

With the mobile phone business under pressure, automobiles have become a new focus. Huawei has repeatedly conveyed the message to the outside world that it will not directly manufacture cars, but will only help car companies build better cars.

In May 2019, Huawei officially established the Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU, and integrated it with the Consumer BG the following year.

On April 26, Huawei's rotating chairman Hu Houkun continued to explain in an interview with multiple media at the 2022 Huawei Analyst Conference that Huawei does not manufacture cars. Our positioning is to be a supplier of smart car components. What we need to do is to gather our ICT capabilities and help automakers, including traditional automakers and new car manufacturers, to build good cars based on several key solutions. At the same time, we will fully open up the consumer-oriented channels we have formed over the past few years to help automakers who are willing to cooperate with us sell good cars.

Based on this positioning, Huawei has built related systems, such as smart electric, smart driving, smart cockpit, smart networking, and smart car cloud services, and cooperated with the upstream and downstream of the automotive industry chain. In addition, it also cooperates with vehicle manufacturers, such as launching related models with BAIC Arcfox, Avita, GAC, and Xiaokang Seres.

Previously, as the president of Huawei's intelligent driving product line, Su Jing launched the autonomous driving system solution ADS during his tenure. In 2021, the BAIC Alpha S was equipped with this solution, which attracted a lot of attention. Su Jing participated in the research and development of Huawei HiSilicon chips, led the development of Huawei's Da Vinci AI chip architecture, and served as the chief architect of Huawei Terminal Company.

The Star Channel, which has interviewed Su Jing, commented that she has a quick mind, speaks very fast, has a very forward-looking vision for autonomous driving, is extremely confident, and is not reluctant to share her views on other companies in the industry - after speaking, she would very professionally add: This is my personal opinion, and does not represent the company's position.

If nothing unexpected happens, Su Jing will have every chance to be further reused. However, in July 2021, some of his speeches and opinions during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference finally changed his trajectory.

Su Jing, former president of Huawei's intelligent driving product line

Su Jing mentioned Tesla, saying that Tesla’s accident rate has been quite high in recent years, and that the types of accidents are very similar from the first person it “killed” to the most recent person it “killed”.

"I used the word ' murder ' here , which may sound serious to you. But in fact, if you think about it, when machines enter human society and coexist with humans, accidents will definitely occur. To put it bluntly, it is called ' murder '. It's just that we need to reduce the probability of accidents to the lowest possible. From a probability perspective, it is something that may happen."

In addition, Su Jing also believes that L5 (fully autonomous driving) level autonomous driving will never be achieved, mainly because the definition of L5 level autonomous driving is to cover all scenarios at any time, any place, and all weather conditions. No human driver can do it, and machines cannot do it for a considerable period of time. Autonomous driving manufacturers can already achieve L4 (highly autonomous driving) level in experimental environments, but when it comes to user use, it can only approach L3 (conditional autonomous driving) level.

Soon, Su Jing was removed from her position, and it was said that the appointment and removal document was signed by Ren Zhengfei.

Huawei said that Su Jing made inappropriate remarks about Tesla when she was participating in an external event and talking about autonomous driving technology and safety. Su Jing has conducted a deep review of her personal inappropriate remarks, but in view of the negative impact of her remarks, Huawei has decided to remove Su Jing from the position of director of the Intelligent Driving Product Department of the Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU. Su Jing will go to the strategic reserve team for training and assignment.

Before leaving, there were reports that Su Jing might join NIO. Later, there were rumors that Su Jing might lead a team to join Volkswagen and serve as the CTO of the autonomous driving company established by Volkswagen in China. Obviously, these were denied by reality.

However, Huawei's automotive business is in a period of adjustment and development, and many executives have left in recent years.

For example, He Liyang, who served as the director of Huawei's Western European Enterprise Business Department and vice president of Huawei's automotive business, went to Xiaopeng Motors in early 2021 and recently left Xiaopeng; in November 2011, Chen Qi joined Geely's pure electric brand Zeekr as vice president of autonomous driving; in April this year, Cai Jianyong joined CATL, responsible for CTC battery chassis integration business.

The question that remains is whether Yu Chengdong, who is also the CEO of Huawei's Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU, can once again stage a comeback story like he did with the smartphone?

The executive changes at Alibaba Cloud have actually drawn attention to Huawei.

In March this year, Cai Yinghua, former president of Huawei Enterprise BG China, joined Alibaba Cloud as president of global sales. In addition, there were several reports that Ren Geng, president of Alibaba Cloud China, was leaving the company. According to Leifeng.com, he will continue to stay at Alibaba.

Cai Yinghua and Ren Geng were both once employees of Huawei, and now work together at Alibaba Cloud.

Cai Yinghua, former president of Huawei Enterprise BG China

"Tianxia Online Business" believes that in the eyes of industry insiders, Cai Yinghua has two main advantages: one is the ability to build an ecological system. He has been working in sales and industry ecology for many years and has a deep foundation and reputation. He has previously won many government and enterprise orders for Huawei; the second is the construction of industry solutions. The "knowledgeable" strategy he proposed previously at Huawei has brought Huawei closer to the industry, and his attitude has been welcomed by industry ISVs.

Compared to Tsai Ying-hua, Ren Geng left Huawei earlier and joined Alibaba earlier. Even so, Ren Geng still brought the "Huawei style" to Alibaba.

According to Digital Intelligence Frontline, after Ren Geng took office, his style was quite different from that of Alibaba Cloud, and the China region was nicknamed "Alibaba Cloud Huawei China Region" by employees. Ren Geng implemented strong KPIs at Alibaba Cloud, such as quarterly assessments and elimination of the last-placed employees, which led to a high elimination rate for sales employees and was considered the most stringent assessment in the industry.

Currently, the competition in cloud computing is in a stalemate.

In 2021, Huawei repeatedly adjusted its cloud business. In January, Yu Chengdong was first asked to serve as the president of the Cloud and Computing BG. In less than three months, the Cloud and Computing BG was disbanded, and the cloud business department became an independent cloud BU, becoming a first-level business department. Although the level of the cloud department has been lowered, it is rarely equipped with high personnel. Yu Chengdong is the CEO of Huawei Cloud, Zhang Pingan is the president, and Xu Zhijun, the rotating chairman of Huawei, also serves as the chairman of the cloud business. In May, there was another personnel change, and Yu Chengdong was replaced by Zhang Pingan.

At the beginning, Huawei planned to develop computing, storage and cloud together, so it established the Cloud and Computing BG, which was listed as one of the four major BGs along with the consumer, carrier and enterprise businesses. However, after entering the market, it was found that they conflicted with each other, so it split the cloud and computing business. Even so, there were still conflicts. Therefore, Huawei put all cloud native related things into the Cloud BU, and established an independent sales team for the public cloud.

Last year, Eric Xu admitted, "Our internal conflicts and transformation process, from selling products and licenses to selling cloud, were very painful. The only good news is that Huawei Cloud has survived and is gradually developing in a positive direction."

At the 2022 Huawei Analyst Conference in April, Huawei gave a set of data: Huawei Cloud has gathered more than 30,000 partners, there are more than 2.6 million developers developing applications around Huawei Cloud, and there are more than 6,000 applications on the Huawei Cloud market.

"We must also be aware that Huawei is still in the stage of striving to climb the ladder in the cloud business. Compared with the world's and even the leading domestic cloud service providers, we still need to narrow the gap in terms of market share and the competitiveness of cloud service providers' products," said Ken Hu.

Currently, Huawei Cloud has proposed a new business strategy, namely "Everything as a Service", including Infrastructure as a Service, Technology as a Service and Experience as a Service. Tencent Cloud has also proposed a sales reform, hoping to change from the past model of many low-quality, subcontracted projects to a healthy and sustainable business model based on Tencent's self-developed products.

The flow of people reflects industry trends and company changes. From operating systems, smart cars to cloud services, Huawei's frequent personnel changes are precisely its key and a key vantage point for observing a company .

This article is reprinted from " Blue Hole Business " by Global IoT Observer . The content is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Global IoT Observer. It is for communication and learning purposes only. If you have any questions, please contact us at info@gsi24.com.