Ren Zhengfei: The United States is unwilling to fail, but Huawei will one day enter the United States with honor

It is most appropriate to describe Ren Zhengfei's strategic thinking at that time as far-sighted. Now when I look back at Ren Zhengfei's speech "The Best Defense is Offense" delivered in 2013, I feel that Huawei, which emphasizes continuous breakthroughs and openness, seems to have never changed. It is also because of this that Huawei can stand firm even now when the United States is exerting crazy pressure.

Ren Zhengfei believes that the best defense is offense, and we must dare to break our own advantages and form new advantages. The United States is a great country with great power, and we need to pay attention to its understanding of future standards.

Ren Zhengfei pointed out that we should be willing to use ceramic chips in power amplifiers, be bold in investment, and prepare for the future. We should use modern methods to make modern things and be bold in seizing the commanding heights.

Ren Zhengfei emphasized that we must learn to share the cake with our allies, look at the world with an open mind, and move towards openness. Huawei will soon be the world's number one. If we only want to dominate the world and cannot learn to share the cake with our allies, Huawei will be like Genghis Khan or Hitler, and will end up with its own demise. One day Huawei will counterattack and enter the United States. What does it mean to walk in style? Go to the United States with honor.

The following is the full text of the speech:

The best defense is offense

——Minutes of the wireless business meeting reported to Mr. Ren

1. The best defense is offense. Be brave enough to break your own advantages and create new ones.

The network will become flatter and simpler, with wide bandwidth. Accessing the network will be as easy as connecting to a water pipe, and the bit cost will be greatly reduced. What we will face in the future is whether there will be any bands after ultra-broadband. Whether the competition will move from indoors to outdoors or from outdoors to indoors, no one knows the technical route. But what is certain is that the United States will not be willing to lose. The purpose of the United States' insistence on opening up all frequencies of WiFi is to attack from the inside out. Once the roaming problem is solved, Huawei's advantage may not exist. This is my view on the future. Ericsson is a flag. If it wants to maintain the prestige of the flag, it can only attack from the outside to the inside. Huawei is not a flag. Whether it is holding the flag with the left hand (attacking from the inside to the outside) or the right hand (attacking from the outside to the inside), it is very flexible. In the end, no matter which side wins, there will always be a place for Huawei. Maybe in the future, the internal and external methods will be integrated.

The United States is a great country with great power. We should pay attention to its understanding of future standards. If the United States does not use TDD, it will not become an international standard; if the United States promotes WiFi, WiFi will attack the world. The United States is also a place where innovation is booming. Why can the United States form a soil for innovation? First, the United States protects innovation. If FaceBook was in China, it would have been copied thousands of times; second, Americans are not afraid of being rich or being flamboyant, otherwise there would be no Steve Jobs? The United States is very tolerant of Steve Jobs. If Steve Jobs were in another place, his early work would not be recognized. Without the early work, there would be no late work. We should learn from the United States' innovative spirit, innovative mechanism and innovative ability.

We need to break our own advantages and create new ones. If we don't take the initiative to break our own advantages, others will break them sooner or later. We should communicate more with Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, etc. at academic conferences, and form strategic partnerships with them on standards and industrial policies, so that we can cope with the rapidly changing world.

In the past, Huawei took the route of attacking the market from the bottom up. There was no other way except high quality and low price. This killed Western companies and made Huawei suffer a lot. The United States has always attacked from the top down. Google and Facebook are both innovating from a strategic height and attacking from the top down. WiFi is a technology that competes with LTE. You can't say that the United States won't play any tricks. We must fight back with tricks. Don't think that we must have a trick to prevent it. Our company's strategy is all public. It cannot be prevented. We must insist on openness. Only on the basis of openness can we succeed.

I particularly support the establishment of a blue team organization for the wireless product line. If you want to be promoted, you should first join the blue team. If you don't defeat the red team, don't promote the commander. If the commander of the red team has no experience in the blue team, don't promote him. If you don't know how to defeat Huawei, it means you have reached the ceiling. The two armies will eventually have a blowout, and the things that come out of the blowout may be an opportunity point.

I don't care how much Wireless invests in the Blue Army, but we must attack Huawei with great force, just like the directors did in their "Bombardment of Huawei". The articles they publish are sorted by the order in which they enter my mailbox. We must remove Huawei's advantages. Removing advantages is a greater advantage. The data cards of terminals are very profitable. If they are very profitable, there will be a lot of room for others. If others come in, they will eat up our territory. Therefore, making reasonable profits from data cards is a greater advantage, because we will make more money in the long run.

We need to create a protection mechanism within Huawei, and we must give the Blue Team a position. The Blue Team may talk nonsense, and there are some crazy people who dare to think, speak, and act. After the game, we should give them some tolerance. How do you know that they can't find a way out? There are two failed lines of defense in the world. One is the French Maginot Line. France built the Maginot Line to defend against the German army, but Germany did not attack France directly, but went around Belgium to the back of the Maginot Line. This line of defense failed. When Japan was trying to prevent the Soviet Union from attacking Manchuria, it built 17 fortresses in the Northeast. They bet that the Soviet Union would not cross the Greater Khingan Mountains based on tank warfare, but the millions of Soviet Red Army crossed the Greater Khingan Mountains, and Japan's defense line failed. So I think it is impossible to defend, and we must focus on offense. When attacking, we must attach importance to the role of the Blue Team. The Blue Team tried every means to deny the Red Army. Even if they could not deny it, the Blue Team also used their brains. The success of the Three Gorges Dam must affirm the role of opponents. Although the opponents were not acknowledged, the design was modified according to the opposition. We must affirm the value and role of opponents and allow their existence.

Second, we must be willing to spend money to make modern things with modern methods and seize the commanding heights.

We now have to pay attention to weapons when we fight wars, and we have to use weapons to fight. In the past, because we were poor, we emphasized self-reliance, success in one shot, and developing our own testing tools. Now it seems that these are all outdated methods. We must use the most advanced tools to make the most advanced products, and we must be bold in investment. If we conquer the world, we can make more money. All oil transactions in the world are settled in US dollars. During the Iraq War, the United States reduced the price of a barrel of crude oil from more than 30 US dollars to 120 US dollars, and it needed to print money to support oil transactions. The United States made a lot of money just by printing paper. The United States used cash weapons. We must change our mindset and use advanced testing instruments, advanced tools, and scientific methods to develop, serve, and manufacture.

Do we still need to invest a lot of manpower in testing equipment? Do we need to develop tools by ourselves? If we allocate some people from this team to seize strategic commanding heights, how much strength can we increase? If we allocate some people to participate in delivery and quality management, how powerful will Huawei become? Tools need to be reformed, and we need to get used to using advanced tools. It is okay to retain a small team to customize some tools. When buying instruments, we also need people who understand instruments, otherwise we will just buy blindly, but we should not do everything by ourselves. Of course, testing also requires a large number of strategic experts, but they are constructed, and the operation should be handed over to the machine.

We should be willing to fire artillery shells and knock down the mountaintops. The mineral deposits below will be yours. We should be brave enough to use ceramic chips in power amplifiers and be brave enough to invest and prepare for the future. Our company's advantage is mathematical logic, and we have no advantage in the field of physics, so we should not study materials. We should actively cooperate and apply advanced technologies, but not too much ahead of the times.

We must use modern methods to make modern things and dare to seize the commanding heights. Some companies are still losing money no matter how much they save, but we are still making money no matter how much we invest. This is because our methods of operation are different.

3. Find the law of value and achieve commercial success

Japanese mobile phones are characterized by being short, compact and thin. Nokia phones are very reliable and can last for 20 years. Why do they all fail in terminals? Apple phones are the most unreliable. Why can they sell in large quantities? Because they can quickly provide a large amount of software. Japanese manufacturers are too strict and rigid in their platforms and cannot keep up with the rapid changes. Japanese mobile phone manufacturers went bankrupt.