2021 is undoubtedly a difficult year for Huawei. In the past few years, Huawei's mobile phone shipments have ranked among the best in the world, and once comparable to Apple. However, the chip ban in the United States has left Huawei facing a serious lack of cores, shipments have dropped sharply, and the total revenue of the whole year has been greatly discounted, down nearly 30% year-on-year.
Huawei, which has a "tight" life, recently announced a very "generous" decision. On February 7, a number of Huawei insiders revealed relevant news to the media: in 2021, Huawei will still take the form of stock dividends, and pay dividends of more than 50 billion yuan for the company's employees, with an average of about 1.58 yuan per share.
Unlike listed technology companies, Huawei is a company with 100% employees, and at the end of 2020, Huawei had 121,300 employees and a total share capital of about 34.7575 billion shares.
Although huawei's personnel changes greatly throughout 2021, many employees have left, but there are also many new employees, and the total share capital and 2020 have not changed much between time and time. According to this data, the total amount of Huawei's dividends in 2021 is about 54.9 billion.
Although the 1.58 yuan per share in 2021 is a 15% drop compared to the 1.86 yuan share in 2020. However, compared with the 28.9% decline in operating income, Huawei's dividend this time has been very conscientious. What's more, as early as 2020, the average annual salary of employees announced by Huawei is 700,000 yuan, and Huawei's employee treatment can be said to be quite generous.
Of course, not all employees can hold shares in Huawei, in 2020, Huawei has 194,000 employees worldwide, but the number of shareholders is only 121,300, and only about 62.5% of all employees can participate in the shareholding. Some relevant media have learned that only employees who have been employed for 2 years and have outstanding performance have shareholding qualifications.
Among all the shareholders, Ren Zhengfei, as the founder of Huawei, is declining year by year, and Ren Zhengfei still has 0.94% of the shares in his hands in 2020. By 2021, Ren Zhengfei will have only 0.9% of the shares, and the other 99.1% will be held by the Huawei union of employees.
Smartphone sales fell out of the top five in the world, annual revenue fell by 28.9%, and Huawei, which also issued two medium-term notes in January, why does it still have the strength to pay 50 billion dividends to employees?
1, other businesses are making efforts
Although Huawei's mobile phone business has been hit hard, in the field of communications, Huawei is still far ahead.
According to relevant data, Huawei's 5G patents in 2021 will rank first with a share of 15.4%, and these patented technologies are Huawei's most solid bottom cards. Last year, Huawei's share of the global communications market was 26%, throwing out Nokia, Ericsson and other opponents a lot, and its dominance in the field of communications should not be underestimated.
In addition to communication services, Huawei has also blossomed in tracks such as operating systems and smart cars. As of December 2021, there are more than 220 million devices equipped with Hongmeng system, and in addition to smart phones, Hongmeng systems can also be applied in aerospace, electric power, agriculture and other fields.
Diversified development allows Huawei to face the squeeze of the United States and calmly cope with it, and these calm are inseparable from R & D talents.
2, talent is the top priority
On January 25, the US chip giant Micron dissolved the DRAM chip design team in Shanghai and selected more than 40 core senior technicians in the team, providing them with immigration qualifications in the United States and allowing these technicians to go to the United States to continue technology research and development.
Even the giants of the United States are eyeing the high-end scientific research talents on the mainland and trying their best to dig up their own countries, and the importance of talents is self-evident. Huawei attaches no less importance to talents than European and American giants, and has said before: it is necessary to leave independently cultivated core technical talents at high salaries. The more he was stuck in chip technology, the more Ren Zhengfei realized the importance of technology and talent.
In 2021, Huawei invested 17.46 billion euros in technology research and development, ranking second among global technology companies and second only to Google. In terms of talent investment, Huawei's investment has always been very large, and the annual talent investment expenditure has exceeded 160 billion yuan, which can be said to be on par with the investment in product research and development.
Stock dividends, in other words, are the second sharing of the company's annual operating results, which is a kind of "golden handcuffs" that lock talents on top of wages and bonuses, which can make employees more belonging and more willing to contribute to the company. "Tilting to workers" has always been the corporate management concept pursued by Ren Zhengfei, and because of this, Huawei has always been generous in stock dividends.
Huawei recruits talents from all over the world, it can be said that it has been famous for many years, just in late January this year, there are two Russian post-00s genius teenagers who accepted the invitation to join Huawei, these two teenagers are only 22 years old and 20 years old, and after joining Huawei, they directly worked as senior engineers at Huawei's Novgorod Research Institute, and the annual salaries of these two people are about 2 million yuan. It is mainly to carry out forward-looking scientific research around the six major topics of "connectivity", "artificial intelligence", "intelligent terminal", "cloud and computing", "intelligent automobile" and "intelligent manufacturing".
Once upon a time, the Chinese people believed that "it is better to build than to buy, and it is better to buy than to rent". Nowadays, the era of "building is better than buying" has long become a thing of the past, and Huawei's 50 billion dividends and the high-profile robbery of American companies are revealing a signal: in this technological change, the competition for talents has been "rolled".
Huawei uses high salaries to preferentially treat talents and retain talents, and is ahead of other technology companies. Perhaps as Ren Zhengfei said in the letter: Huawei's spring will soon come.