Huawei is in a race with itself in the 5G race

Recently, Huawei announced that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued China's first 5G radio communication equipment access license. Huawei was the first to obtain the first 5G base station equipment access license, which means that Huawei's 5G base station equipment can support large-scale deployment in China and officially access the public telecommunications commercial network.

Although Huawei's senior executives have repeatedly stated on different occasions that the US Entity List has not hit Huawei's overall strategy, questions like this have surrounded Huawei over the past 150 days.

This is because, in the global supply chain division of labor, almost no company engaged in the communications business can survive without American components. Some institutions even predicted that Huawei's inventory will not last more than a year and a half. According to the supplier list that Huawei once disclosed, there were 92 core suppliers on the list last year, with the largest number of suppliers from the United States, reaching 33, accounting for about 36%.

A reporter from China Business News recently conducted an in-depth interview with the head of Huawei's 5G product line, trying to understand the true status of Huawei's current 5G development.

"Our shipments have increased by 300% since May, without a single day of interruption." Gan Bin, vice president of Huawei's 5G product line, said in an exclusive interview with a reporter that general-purpose chips cannot produce differentiated products. Huawei started investing in key technologies several years ago, such as power amplifier links, RF, baseband, etc., and has achieved independent design. Its partners are not just American companies.

Gan Bin said that Huawei is still increasing its investment in the 5G field. The entity list has brought some troubles, but Huawei has always adopted a multi-supplier strategy and is now just accelerating the progress of the plan.

The reporter learned from Huawei that 5G base station product modules that do not contain American components have been shipped to all parts of the world. According to internal plans, Huawei's 5G base station production this year is expected to be about 600,000.

Changing tires while fighting

According to the latest data disclosed by Huawei, Huawei has signed more than 60 5G commercial contracts with leading global operators, and more than 400,000 5G base station modules (AAU) have been shipped to all parts of the world.

"Huawei has always advocated multi-path, multi-echelon, saturated attack, and saturated investment. Once a direction is identified, we will focus on it and continuously solve the problems of commercial products." Gan Bin told reporters that Huawei once researched a key technology for five years, but it was not commercialized for five years. It was not until the sixth year that the problem was overcome. Currently, the version switching of 5G products is more a matter of time.

Previously, a securities firm released a report saying that the maturity and high reliability of base station chips are not comparable to those of consumer-grade chips. It takes at least two years from the beginning of trial to mass use, and in terms of key technologies, American manufacturers are the leaders.

Gan Bin said that it is indeed impossible for Huawei to produce everything by itself, but investment in key areas began as early as ten years ago, and partners are its support. "Take the field of antennas as an example. Domestic manufacturers have done well, and Huawei itself has accumulated experience in the field of antennas. Large-scale antenna solutions have been deployed on a large scale."

The second part, power amplifier and radio frequency, is the most difficult part of base station chips. The biggest challenge is to gradually improve the efficiency of the power amplifier. Gan Bin said that in this area, Huawei not only cooperates with American manufacturers, but also conducts joint design with other manufacturers. In 2012, it promoted suppliers to use emerging materials for joint design.

As for the medium-frequency chips, Gan Bin revealed that Huawei began to develop its own medium-frequency chips four or five years ago.

"All algorithms require intermediate frequencies for preprocessing. When I first started working in wireless twenty years ago, the intermediate frequencies were all analog. Later, digital technology was introduced into the intermediate frequencies, and at this time, various digital algorithms began to appear. In early 2004, FPGA was used, but it was found that general-purpose chips were not effective enough, so we added our own algorithms to Asics to design chips. So this part was equivalent to localization more than ten years ago, and we no longer relied on the United States for foundry services," Gan Bin told reporters.

Race with yourself

While Huawei is working on its plans, its various business units are also working hard to promote the development of 5G. Most of the news in the past week is related to 5G.

Two days earlier, on the 23rd, Huawei's first 5G folding screen phone, the HUAWEI Mate X, was released for the first time in China, priced at 16,999 yuan. The 5G version of the Mate 30 released on the same day was called a "nuclear-level" product by Huawei, and the company hoped that the sales of the Mate series would reach 10 million in three months.

In addition, Huawei also launched the world's first commercial 5G industrial module this week, attempting to expand 5G applications to the industrial Internet of Things. Keywords such as "5G industrial module without any US components" and "eliminating US chips to achieve independent control of core components" flooded social media and once again boosted the capital market's enthusiasm for Huawei concept stocks.

Regarding the 5G track, Gan Bin said that they are still working on technical breakthroughs. "We already have more than a dozen base station production lines. Each production line requires an investment of tens of millions of yuan just for equipment and factory buildings. We will continue to expand the scale of production lines in the future." Gan Bin told reporters that Huawei is two years ahead in (base station) hardware, especially in the field of Massive MIMO (large-scale antenna technology). Massive MIMO is a key technology in 5G to improve system capacity and spectrum utilization.

At present, Huawei has reached the third generation of 5G Massive MIMO, accounting for more than 90% of global shipments, and is also one of the key technologies that Huawei has used to distance itself from its competitors in 5G. "China Telecom and China Unicom want to share. Now the goods we send to them are all 200M. If they were 100M, there would be no way to share. One module can support 200M, but they need two," said Gan Bin.

According to the reporter's understanding, within Huawei, the choice of technology path is usually made five or even ten years in advance. The ideas of researchers are combined with the ideas of product developers, and multiple paths and echelons collide. They may not be correct within three years, but from a ten-year perspective, there may be output.

"In 2015, we were hesitant internally about whether the direction of large broadband was correct. Some people were also asking, the United States had chosen millimeter wave, how should we view this choice." Gan Bin told reporters that through discussions and technological accumulation, Huawei ultimately believed that the value of 5G lies in the fact that the cost per bit must be reduced, so large bandwidth and multiple antennas are required. Huawei then made huge investments along this path and accumulated key technologies. In less than two years, the solution was implemented.

Swiss telecommunications company Sunrise chose Huawei's 5G equipment six months ago and achieved 5G network coverage in more than 300 towns across Switzerland through deployment in different scenarios. Germany, Europe's largest economy, recently announced a set of proposed rules on 5G network security, which did not exclude Huawei but required all suppliers and operators to meet common standards.

"What you can see are the products, and what you can't see is the technology beneath the iceberg. Our innovations in key 5G technologies in chips, materials, algorithms, antennas, heat dissipation and other fields have laid the foundation for 5G's minimalist network and ultimate experience." Peng Honghua, chief marketing officer of Huawei's wireless network, told reporters that Huawei has started research on 5G since 4G was just put into commercial use in 2009, and has invested a total of US$4 billion to date.

In this regard, Yang Chaobin, president of the 5G product line, told reporters that the security issue of 5G is not a matter for Huawei alone, but a common challenge faced by the entire industry. Judging from the current deployment of 5G macro-pole micro-stereoscopic networking solutions, Huawei is still popular in the European market. However, it is also foreseeable that Huawei may be continuously questioned by the US government on 5G security.