Huawei: Survival is our main priority

Author | Wang Gang

Produced by | Leifeng.com Industry Group

HUAWEI CONNECT is Huawei's largest global ecosystem conference for the ICT industry, and this year marks its fifth anniversary.

This has always been the platform for Huawei to release major strategies.

过去在这个舞台上，华为呼吁过全球伙伴共建哥斯达黎加式生态（2016年），提出过要做全球五朵云之一（2017年，宣布战略投入公有云），发布过AI战略（2018年，华为发布昇腾910和310这两颗AI芯片），更在这里阐述了全新的计算战略（2019年）。

What theme is Huawei targeting this year?

On the morning of September 23, Huawei Connect 2020 opened at the Shanghai World Expo.

In the words of Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping at the main forum, 5G has been deployed on a large scale around the world this year, and the five technologies and five major opportunities of "connectivity, computing, cloud, AI, and industry applications" have come together unprecedentedly. This year's theme should be "Five-machine Collaboration."

Guo Ping started his speech bluntly: Huawei is facing great difficulties now.

"The continued suppression has put a lot of pressure on our operations, and survival is our main priority."

But as Alexandre Dumas once said: All human wisdom is contained in these two words: waiting and hope. Huawei sees that the ICT industry is facing huge development opportunities. Governments and enterprises are fully entering the digital and intelligent era. The digital economy has become the main theme of economic growth. The foundation of the digital economy is connectivity and computing. 5G and the Internet of Things are connectivity technologies, while cloud and AI represent computing technologies.

Guo Ping mentioned that 1G to 4G solved the problem of connecting people, and 5G ushered in a new era of the Internet of Everything; the focus of computing has gradually shifted to AI, which has indeed created value in the main business of governments and enterprises. Connectivity and computing need to be deeply integrated with the industry, find scenarios that can be implemented, target pain points in production systems, and quickly create value through the combination of ICT technology and industry knowledge.

This means that Huawei’s new focus is beginning to surface.

Guo Ping then shared the current progress and latest strategies of Huawei's related businesses.

Connection : As digitalization of various industries enters production systems, the demand for connection has also changed dramatically. For example, mines, ports, and factories all require higher bandwidth. Smart manufacturing in different industries requires different latency and reliability, which requires the network to provide differentiated experience while also having SLA guarantees. To meet these requirements, Huawei has proposed the concept of intelligent connection to create a ubiquitous gigabit, deterministic experience, and hyper-automated network.

计算 ：时代需要多样性的算力协同来满足新的需求。华为提供多样性算力，采用软硬件解耦的设计，以适配不同的处理器，包括X86和鲲鹏等。华为将持续推进鲲鹏/昇腾产业，走硬件开放、软件开源、基础软件开源道路。

Cloud computing : Cloud is the best platform for releasing computing power and the digital foundation of the intelligent world. Three years ago, also at this conference, Huawei proposed to be one of the five clouds for the intelligent world and promised to invest in public cloud in the long term. After three years of continuous efforts, Huawei Cloud now has 23 regions around the world, has developed more than 1.5 million developers, a market growth rate of 220% in 2019, and more than 18,000 partners - this is not a relief for the Huawei Cloud team, but more pressure, because they have to challenge higher goals. In the future, Huawei will further improve hybrid cloud solutions to meet the complex needs of government and enterprise transformation and become the first choice for customers' intelligent upgrades.

AI : AI is developing very fast, but Huawei has also made a lot of attempts to apply AI to the main business systems of government and enterprises. For example, Shenzhen Airport launched the "One Face to Go All Over the Airport" program, in which differentiated security checks increased efficiency by 60%; during the epidemic, AI was applied to clinical CT-assisted diagnosis, reducing the viewing time from 12 minutes to seconds; applied to financial anti-fraud, the risk warning time was shortened to minutes, making the impossible possible.

Guo Ping said that in his opinion, connectivity and computing are a bit like electricity more than 100 years ago, which has evolved from simply providing lighting to household appliances and industrial equipment, bringing about earth-shaking changes in various industries and pushing mankind into the era of electrification.

In this process, household and industrial electrification has created an industry scale that is dozens or even hundreds of times larger than the scale of the power industry. In 2016, Huawei proposed to build a Costa Rican-style ecosystem to enable partners to expand the market and make Huawei's partners the biggest beneficiaries of the new value chain, just like electrical companies in the power era.

Tektronix Education is one of the "biggest beneficiaries" mentioned by Guo Ping. Tektronix Education is a traditional IT training institution. Through cooperation with Huawei Cloud, in 2020, Tektronix Education's transaction volume in the cloud market exceeded 80 million, an increase of more than 8 times year-on-year.

This is just a typical example in Guo Ping's eyes.

Talking about the supply chain, Guo Ping said with emotion that the revelation Huawei received was the blow of the supply chain. Today, Huawei will use all its strength to help its partners grow stronger, which is to help Huawei itself grow.

He used the example of key components of a 5G base station to analyze this topic.

Xunqiang Electronics is a traditional radiator supplier. It started cooperating with Huawei in 2016. In the process of transformation and development of 5G radiators, Xunqiang actively invested and achieved breakthroughs in surface treatment technology with the help of Huawei. At the same time, through collaboration with Huawei, Xunqiang optimized the processing procedures and logistics routes, greatly improved product quality, production efficiency and supply capacity, and reduced costs by 30%. After three years of cooperation with Huawei, sales to Huawei have increased more than 20 times.

As early as 2009, ChinaSoft International had already started cooperation with Huawei. In 2014, it began to enter the international market. In 2017, it became the first partner of Huawei Cloud, and in 2019, it joined the Huawei Cloud Kunpeng Lingyun Partner Program. It can be said that in different periods of Huawei's development, ChinaSoft International insisted on strategic coordination, complementary interests, and sharing weal and woe, and advanced and retreated together at critical moments.

Guo Ping concluded that Huawei will continue to focus on products and services such as connectivity, computing, cloud, and AI; Huawei will generate electricity, and partners will do electrification, and together we will achieve commercial success. In addition, Huawei will also cooperate with global partners in a wider range of areas such as basic innovation, standards, talent, and social responsibility.

The last PPT in Guo Ping's speech quoted a poem by Walt Whitman.

After the main forum of the conference, global media interviewed Guo Ping and several other Huawei executives, who also answered some sensitive questions.

The executives who attended the interview were:

Guo Ping, Rotating Chairman of Huawei

Wang Tao, Executive Director of Huawei and Chairman of the Product Investment Review Committee

Peng Zhongyang, Huawei Director and President of Enterprise BG

Zhang Pingan, President of Huawei Consumer Cloud Services

Hou Jinlong, President of Huawei Cloud and Computing BG

Regarding the US ban on Huawei, Guo Ping said that Huawei will continue to adhere to its globalization strategy. ICT is a mutually beneficial model that is most beneficial to all parties.

Regarding the impact of the US's "Clean 5G" plan on Huawei, Wang Tao, executive director of Huawei and chairman of the Product Investment Review Committee, said that Huawei's customers and operators will make judgments based on facts and rationality, and Huawei is focused on providing leading solutions. This is the current focus.

Regarding Huawei's plan to cut R&D funding and layoffs in Australia, Wang Tao said that Australia is a very small market and Huawei will use high-quality resources to serve high-quality customers, and will make adjustments in small markets.

Guo Ping added that Huawei's talent business is very stable and will continue to attract the best talents. The key to solving Huawei's problems is excellent talents, and turning sand into chips depends on excellent talents. Individual markets will adjust according to demand.

In response to the question of what the mobile phone business has done while waiting for chips, Zhang Pingan, President of Huawei Consumer Business Cloud Service, said that during this period, Huawei was thinking about how to continue to innovate in other areas under the condition of limited chip resources; Huawei Consumer Business still has 700 million users and needs to continue to provide services. HMS is such an innovation, and the next operating system (meaning Hongmeng) will also have different innovations. The US suppression will not slow down Huawei's pace, but will make it more determined to build the HMS ecosystem. The ecosystem is very open and ultimately serves users.

Regarding Huawei's view on Qualcomm's application to the US government for permission to supply chips to Huawei, Guo Ping said that Huawei has noticed Qualcomm's application to sell chips to Huawei, and once approved, Huawei would be happy to use Qualcomm's chips to produce mobile phones.