Text/Haifeng looks at technology
The keynote speech of the 19th Huawei Global Analyst Conference was held on April 26, and Hou Kun, Chairman of Huawei's Rotating Chairman, and Wang Tao, Managing Director of Huawei and Director of the ICT Infrastructure Business Management Committee, answered eight major questions on chips, car manufacturing, HUAWEI CLOUD, meta-universe, and consumer business in the QA session.
Q1: This year, Huawei has put forward the goal of surviving with quality, so in order to achieve this goal, what areas will it focus on? What do you think is the biggest problem we are facing right now?
Hu Houkun: This year, we have seen that the difficulties we faced in the past have not decreased, and the changes in this external environment have brought us more difficulties. For example, geopolitical conflicts, the global epidemic has not disappeared, global inflation is coming, commodity prices are rising, and exchange rate fluctuations are all serious challenges that we will face in the entire financial environment this year.
We have to survive first, but we have to improve the quality of our survival, how do we understand these quality problems? I'm going to share a couple of perspectives with you.
First of all, the first quality, I think Huawei wants to ensure the quality of the product solutions and services that huawei provides to customers, and we will take a lot of measures in this regard, and from the perspective of the last two years, we have done a good job in this regard. Customers are generally satisfied. Of course, in the current situation, we pay more attention to the voice of the customer, so in the past few years we have invested more resources in the customer satisfaction management, we hope to be able to know the problems encountered by the customer at any time. Huawei has difficulties, customers also have difficulties, we need to work with customers to find difficulties at any time to solve problems.
The second aspect, the so-called quality should be reflected in Huawei's steady operation, then as an enterprise can not survive, everything is empty, no matter how beautiful our imagination of the future, no matter how ambitious our ideals, can not survive, everything is empty.
To survive Huawei, we must first achieve steady operation, and there are a few points that we should pay special attention to. The first one is that the whole company is going to have to pay special attention to the quality of the trades at the moment, and we're now facing all sorts of external difficulties that we might encounter in business that are all sorts of invisible pitfalls. Then this poses a new challenge to our ability to operate in this new situation.
We are also currently experiencing a lot of problems, we have to manage the quality of our transactions, for some low quality transactions, we will give up. On the other hand, Huawei's entire business portfolio is now more diversified than in the past, and we also require each business unit to do a solid job in steady operation.
We have to face the future, for the future to continue to innovate in the future, we will invest in talents, provide sufficient funds and resources to guarantee, optimize the innovation path, through these measures to make today's investment can make the future development more qualitative.
Q2: Huawei previously proposed 5.5G for wireless, and today Mr. Hu proposed 5.5G for fixed networks in his speech, what considerations did Huawei put forward these development visions, and what is the significance and value for the development of the ICT industry?
Hu Houkun: We put forward two 5.5G based on the demand for connectivity in social development is endless, innovation in the field of connectivity should be endless, in the past there was a wrong way of saying that connectivity is a sunset industry, just because we don't agree with this at all, we think it is a sunrise industry.
Wang Tao: In fact, the connection is not a sunset industry, but a sunrise industry. Connectivity is the foundation of the intelligent world, and if individual family organizations are separated, their functions are useless.
In the field of communication, the most important one is mobile communication, and one is fixed communication. But the communications space is actually a generation every 10 years. Around 2020, mobile communications into the 5G era, we can look forward to the next 6G at least until 2030, in the middle of the 10-year process, technology is not stagnant, but to continue to evolve and develop, so two years ago, when 5G just began to deploy, we proposed that we and the industry to define the roadmap for continuous evolution in the process of 5G to 6G evolution.
In the past 2 to 3 years, 5G has developed rapidly around the world, so far more than 200 operators around the world have commercialized 5G technology, and 5G users have reached more than 700 million.
In the process of business, we also found that 5G technology itself has many limitations, such as the rate, including the upper and lower limits, there are many problems, its latency has not yet reached a requirement that can really support a higher quality service experience for us, and there are still many defects in the knowledge ability of the Internet of Things.
So in this case, we call on the industry to jointly define 5.5G, 5.5G is the most direct experience for consumers, and by around 2025, we hope that 5G technology can achieve a downward peak rate of 1 Gbps.
In the fixed-line space, F5G defines the rate, hoping to achieve peak rates of 10Gbps, and I think the current home broadband, including fixed-line communications, there are many quality of use issues.
In the home environment, the WiFi access rate is low, the access rate is different in different rooms, so we should continue to promote the continuous evolution of the fixed communication field, and also propose the same evolution rhythm as mobile communications, by 2025, we hope that the fixed network will also evolve to F5.5G.
Q3: Seeing the growth of HUAWEI CLOUD business from last year's annual report, I want to know what the layout and direction of SOME OF THE NEXT BUSINESS OF HUAWEI CLOUD ARE?
Hu Houkun: Regarding HUAWEI CLOUD, HUAWEI CLOUD ranks second in China and fifth in the world in terms of market share. For example, HUAWEI CLOUD has gathered more than 30,000 partners, more than 2.6 million developers around HUAWEI CLOUD, and more than 6,000 applications on the cloud market.
On the other hand, HUAWEI's cloud business is still in a stage of hard work, and this year the cloud service team put forward the concept of everything as a service, that is, basic facilities and services. Taking the Chinese market as an example, the digitization of thousands of industries in China is now bringing very good opportunities for the development of public cloud business.
Each enterprise has different application scenarios, and the production model is different, so to help them get to the cloud, how to use the cloud requires a very strong service capability, and this service capability is precisely Huawei's strength. Under the strategy of putting forward everything as a service, we have seen many gratifying changes, and customers are getting easier, more and more comfortable, and more and more comfortable with HUAWEI CLOUD services.
For example, technology and services, just introduced in Tianjin Port, the use of AI development tools, is a typical example; in terms of technology and services, the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University uses huawei cloud on the Pangu drug molecular model to do new broad-spectrum antibacterial drug research and development, and the research and development cycle is shortened from several years to several months.
Q4: What is the outlook for Huawei's consumer business? What are the next strategies for the gap in the decline of consumer business?
Hu Houkun: In the terminal business, although there has been a great decline in mobile phones, we can use a new perspective to look at the terminal business, and mobile phones are very important in terminal business, but not only mobile phones. We now propose that the hardware "1+8+N+ software ecosystem" and build an all-scenario intelligent experience have become a very clear strategy for terminal services.
Last year, we saw that the strategy was initially effective, on the one hand, products, such as smart wearable devices, watches, bracelets, speakers, smart large screens, and tablet equipment shipments have all grown well.
On the other hand, in terms of software ecology, Hongmeng ecology has also developed well. At present, there are more than 220 million Huawei devices equipped with HarmonyOS, and Hongmeng Zhilian has more than 1,900 ecological partners, and the shipment of new ecological devices will exceed 100 million units in 2021.
Q5: How is Huawei's smart car business developing? Is it possible that the sales target of the previous online transmission will be completed this year? Will new cars be released this year?
Hu Houkun: Whether it is Huawei's self-selected mode or Huawei's inside model, we will definitely have new product releases this year. I'll report the general progress of Huawei's current car business to you.
First of all, we have a clearer understanding of the smart car components business, from the market trends and our opportunities. The so-called industry trends, we are increasingly seeing the automotive industry to a critical inflection point.
The four modernizations that everyone talks about, such as electrification, intelligence, networking, and sharing, have become more and more clear future directions. Behind these four modernizations means that the automotive industry is entering a period of transformation, in the process of transformation, digital technology, power electronics technology is the key enabling technology. Huawei has accumulated a lot of technological innovation in ICT technology and power electronics technology in the past 30 years.
Based on this understanding, it is further clarified how Huawei will develop in the future of this industry, and what is its strategy? Huawei does not build cars, we are positioned as a supplier of smart car components, what we have to do is to gather ICT capabilities, based on several key solutions, to help car companies build good cars.
Based on this positioning and business strategy, we do several things well. The first is to focus on several key subsystems to create competitive solutions, including smart electric, autonomous driving, smart cockpit, smart networking, and smart car cloud.
Based on the solution, the second key work we have to do is to open up and cooperate with upstream and downstream partners in the industrial flow industry chain, and now the number of enterprises cooperating with us has reached more than 300.
On the other hand, we are also actively cooperating with OEMs in different ways, including at the subsystem level, at the component level, and more in-depth cooperation based on Huawei's inside model.
Q6: During the epidemic period, Huawei helped the Asia-Pacific region to promote digital transformation, for example, the new 5G hospital in Thailand and the Series of digital transformation initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region, so I would like to share some of the challenges encountered in promoting digital transformation in the Asia-Pacific region, what are the progress, and what are the new plans for digital transformation in the region in the future?
Hu Houkun: From my observation, the characteristics of digitalization in the Asia-Pacific region are that the vast majority of Asia-Pacific countries have a relatively advanced understanding of the government's national strategy in terms of digitalization.
There are several common approaches to advancing digitalization in the Asia-Pacific region, the first of which is to build a strong digital infrastructure and greatly improve the level of local digital infrastructure. In terms of infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region, Huawei is helping the host country to build infrastructure, especially wireless, fixed broadband networks, and data centers. On the other hand, a lot of investment has been made to help local government operators and enterprises to make good use of these data centers.
The second key is to adhere to the strategy of low-carbon development. This year, Huawei actively promoted green site solutions to help customers build green strategies and help operators achieve emission reductions. By the end of 2021, the entire digital energy sector will help customers use photovoltaic power generation in the Asia-Pacific region to provide 10 million uses to the ICT industry, and help customers build more than 230 more energy-efficient data centers in the Asia-Pacific region.
The third point is to make great efforts to cultivate ICT talents. In the next 5 years, we will cultivate 500,000 ICT talents in the Asia-Pacific region. We also hope to launch a special plan for countries in the Asia-Pacific region to invest $100 million over three years in terms of the speed of start-ups in ICT, to help the Asia-Pacific region build a more dynamic and healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Q7: The original universe, which has been very popular recently, is now very many companies releasing products and solutions in the cloud universe field, how does Huawei understand the cloud universe? Will there be a presence in the relevant product and solution areas?
Hu Houkun: Metaversity is indeed a very hot topic, and it is also a particularly big topic. From a global point of view, the concept of the original universe is in the hype stage, Huawei is a technology company, the more lively the hype period, we have to calm down. What we're going to do is try to get to the point behind it as much as possible through the hustle and bustle.
When it comes to the nature of the metaverse, I also have a few immature views. The essence of the first metacosm is fusion, which means the fusion of the physical world and this digital world, for example, through 3D modeling simulation, digital twins, it is possible to find optimization solutions to the physical world in the digital world. For example, the simulation training of autonomous driving in the future, the simulation of smart factories, and the digital twins of smart cities.
The future value of the second metaverse, not only in toC, but also in toB, is likely to be even greater. When it comes to Huawei's technology strategy, it is still a bit too early to say that we have a complete strategy, but I think for us, we need to calmly judge its future development, and Huawei has a lot to do in the future, whether it is from connection to computing to the cloud, or even to the terminal.
Wang Tao: What Huawei has to do is how to work with the industry to jointly promote the construction of a truly immersive interactive virtual digital world when the meta-universe arrives, and Huawei's layout in various industries is also a simple report to you.
The metacosm may involve a 7-tier model, including the infrastructure layer, the terminal layer, the decentralized service layer, the spatial computing, the creation platform layer, the application platform and the content application platform, as well as the content.
For Huawei, in fact, Huawei is still around our long-term focus, such as ICD infrastructure, cloud and intelligent terminals to do the original is the development that I am willing to do, to make the contribution that we as a company can make.
At the infrastructure layer, the digital world and the physical world need to be fully integrated, and higher requirements are put forward for the latency of real-time interaction, the bandwidth of communication up and downlink, rendering also requires greater computing power, and it is necessary to organically combine connection and computing.
At the terminal level, Huawei mainly conducts research and development and investment in mobile phones, glasses, wearable devices and other aspects. For example, XR hardware and 3D spatial video solutions have made great progress.
On the application and creation platform, we plan and lay out based on HUAWEI CLOUD, and build a digital content production line based on Meta Studio to continuously create more creative content for the digital world.
Q8: In order to solve the problem of chip supply chain, does Huawei have any plans to build a chip factory? For future chip supply security, are there any long-term plans? Can the company's recent patent-pending 3D stacking technology ease the pressure of U.S. sanctions?
Hu Houkun: Although we are facing a shortage of chips now, we are not building our own chip factories at present.
Wang Tao: Chips or semiconductor industry chains are very long, involving chip design, manufacturing a lot of chains, in fact, any company, including Huawei, can not solve this problem on their own. The solution of the chip problem requires the upstream and downstream of the whole industry chain to work together to solve, one-sided decoupling, splitting are not conducive to the development of the global ICT industry, will only cause slow technological evolution or even regression, resulting in increased costs, these costs are passed on to consumers.
On the other hand, we also see the positive factors it brings, because the shortage of chips has led to the increased investment in semiconductor manufacturing chains in various countries around the world, and everyone's capabilities have been improved in all aspects. We believe that the shortage of chip supply chains may be alleviated within a few years.
We also understand that recently everyone is worried about whether Huawei's products will lag behind in this situation. In fact, Huawei's innovative means are three-dimensional and all-round, Huawei is using the method of system engineering to carry out product research and development, and we have realized the basic theoretical reconstruction through a variety of ways.
Hardware reconstruction, when we design products, often from the system architecture, algorithms, from the software aspect, including video technology and other all-round through the leading products, we are confident that in the next few years, to maintain the leading position of the main products, for customers to continue to create value.
3D stacking technology is a patent we applied for in 2019, our innovations Due to our long-term investment in this field, we are confident that we have always provided leading product solutions to serve customers and partners.