Can Hongmeng help Huawei's automobile business accelerate its embrace of the automotive industry?

"There is no Huawei among the automotive companies yet," but Huawei has accelerated its embrace of the automotive industry.

Recently, news came out that Ren Zhengfei signed an organizational change document to establish the Intelligent Vehicle Solutions BU (Business Unit), which is under the management of the ICT Management Committee and is positioned to provide corporate customers with ICT components and solutions for smart cars. It is mainly responsible for industry insights and customer needs analysis in the field of smart cars, as well as formulating relevant strategic plans and business plans.

The same news also revealed that "Wang Jun, President of Huawei's Wireless Network Business Unit and Japan Carrier Business Unit, will become President of the Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU."

BU is a first-level department within Huawei, on par with BG. If the above news is true, it means that the Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU will become the fifth largest business unit, on par with Carrier BG, Enterprise BG, Consumer BG, and Cloud BU.

In fact, Huawei's entry into the automotive industry is no longer news. Since 2015, it has signed strategic cooperation agreements or cooperation projects with SAIC, Changan, Dongfeng, FAW, BAIC, BYD, Volvo, Audi and other automakers in the fields of LTE-V integrated communication solutions, 5G Internet of Vehicles, and L4 autonomous driving.

As Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun said in an interview with the media, Huawei does not believe in overtaking on a curve, but believes in changing lanes to overtake. "Chinese companies have few opportunities to catch up in the traditional automotive field, but they have much greater opportunities in the new wave of electric smart car transformation."

In April 2019, Huawei, which made its debut, clearly expressed its positioning of "not making cars, but helping car manufacturers make better cars" and "focusing on ICT technology and becoming an incremental component provider for intelligent connected vehicles."

According to the content presented in the PPT at the Shanghai Auto Show, Huawei will include at least five core businesses in the automotive field:

1. Cloud service: The autonomous driving cloud service based on Huawei Cloud includes data platform, training platform, and simulation platform, which can help enterprises realize data structuring, data lake governance, massive data storage, as well as data labeling, obstacle recognition, model training, scenario library, simulation system, evaluation system and other services.

2. Intelligent driving: mainly the on-board intelligent computing platform (Mobile Digital Center, MDC) and intelligent driving subsystem solutions.

3. Intelligent networking: 4G/5G in-vehicle mobile communication modules, as well as T-Box and in-vehicle networks. Huawei’s core business has just been transplanted to the car.

4. Intelligent interconnection: Intelligent networking goes a step further, connecting people, cars, homes and even the external environment.

5. Intelligent energy: multi-mode electric drive, charging and battery management system.

However, according to recent news, Huawei's intelligent automotive solutions BU will also include an important content - the application and promotion of Huawei's Hongmeng "ARK OS" on the car side.

Hongmeng is the underlying operating system developed by a team of thousands of Huawei people over nearly five years and with huge investment. Testing has now begun and it will be first available on Huawei's mobile phones in late 2019 or early 2020.

But it can not only be used on mobile phones, tablets and computers, but also connects TVs, cars, smart wearables and other products, completely unifying them.

This system is also compatible with all Android applications and all Web applications, and can directly integrate application developers in the Android ecosystem and Microsoft ecosystem into it.

In the automotive field, the underlying operating systems currently commonly used are Android or those modified based on Android.

In China, with the rise of intelligent connected cars, operating systems such as AliOS and QingOS, which are developed specifically for automotive application scenarios, as well as so-called "OS" systems such as Baidu and iFlytek that use voice as their entry point, have also emerged.

A person in charge of the Internet of Vehicles who has been in contact with the Hongmeng system said that Huawei's system is more competitive than the existing systems on the market in terms of its ability to connect various mobile terminals horizontally and its compatibility.

According to some technology media reports, in the testing of this system, some software that was previously available on Android performed better: the system operation fluency will be improved by 24%, the system responsiveness will be improved by 44%, the operation fluency of third-party applications will be improved by 60%, etc.

Obviously, Huawei's Hongmeng system will not only help it connect other businesses in the automotive field, but also provide it with greater imagination space and different customer experience in the fields of autonomous driving and Internet of Vehicles in the future.

However, there are still many problems facing Huawei.

On the one hand, the application scenarios in cars still have a big difference in experience from mobile phones and TVs, and it must rely on joint exploration and improvement with more car companies and partners;

On the other hand, how Huawei can generate a complete ecosystem on its own platform and even achieve compatibility with BAT is also a difficult problem that it needs to solve like other OS.