"Huawei's 2021 (earnings) figures look good, but there are still many difficulties." From April 26 to 27, the Huawei Global Analyst Conference was held in Shenzhen. At the main forum of the conference on the afternoon of the 26th, Hu Houkun, rotating chairman of Huawei, said so. He said that facing the future, Huawei is taking positive business initiatives to continuously enhance industrial resilience and survive with quality.
The annual Huawei Global Analyst Conference is an industry exchange conference hosted by Huawei. Since the first session was held in 2004, it has been held for 19 consecutive sessions and has been one of the main windows for the outside world to understand Huawei's latest strategic developments. After being suppressed by the outside world and the first decline in revenue, this conference naturally received greater attention from the outside world.
In his speech, Hu Houkun, the rotating chairman of Huawei, elaborated on Huawei's layout and latest progress in 5G, terminals, cloud computing and other fields, interpreted the new organizational structure of "Legion", and answered questions from the media in the subsequent Q&A session with Wang Tao, managing director of Huawei. It can be said that the outside world has an in-depth analysis of Huawei's current difficulties and ways to break the situation.
Interestingly, the first speaker of the main forum on the afternoon of the 26th was not Hu Houkun, the highest-ranking official, but Zhou Hong, president of Huawei's Strategic Research Institute, which made many people feel unfamiliar. With the terms Nyquist sampling theorem, Shannon's law, and von Neumann's architecture, Zhou Hong released the "10 Problems and Challenges for the Future" on behalf of Huawei, and expressed the hope to explore with academia and industry to carry out future-oriented research.
In addition to survival, Huawei has not stopped thinking about "after tomorrow".
Recruiting talented teenagers with unlimited academic qualifications, Huawei puts forward "10 problems and challenges for the future"
Huawei, which has been unfairly suppressed by the outside, saw a decline in revenue for the first time in the previous year, but R& D investment is still at an all-time high. Just on April 25, Huawei's official public account "Huawei Recruitment" also released a message, announcing a new plan to recruit "talented teenagers" around the world.
In the recruitment information, Huawei said that there is no limit to the academic qualifications of candidates, not limited to schools, but it must have special achievements in mathematics, computers, physics, materials, chips, intelligent manufacturing, chemistry and other related fields, and aspire to become a technology leader. Huawei said it would "attract world-class talent with world-class problems." The "10 problems and challenges for the future" proposed this time may also become the key area for Huawei to recruit "talented teenagers".
Huawei, which has encountered difficulties in chip manufacturing and chip supply, is actively breaking through the blockade through existing technologies, and at the same time, it also emphasizes research and investment in future subversive technologies. "Facing the future, only by boldly proposing hypotheses, boldly proposing visions, and daring to break the rules and regulations of existing theoretical and technical bottlenecks can we make great strides forward." Zhou Hong said in her speech.
These issues and challenges include two basic scientific issues that can be focused on in the future, and eight cutting-edge technology challenges, the former including two aspects of cognitive world and cognition itself, and the latter including new interfaces, new health, new software, new communications, etc.
Huawei put forward 10 questions and challenges for the future
Zhou Hong said that the 21st century will be an era in which human society is fully intelligent, and the core of intelligence is perception, connection and computing, as well as the resulting higher cognition and control of matter and phenomena, life and energy. In the past 10 years, with the rapid development of broadband communications, smart devices, AI and cloud computing, digital technology has greatly enriched people's lives, from telephone calls, Internet browsing information, instant messaging, to map navigation, e-banking, online shopping, etc., ICT technology has become an indispensable and important part of more and more people's lives.
Today, in factories, hospitals, ports, coal mines and other fields, ICT technology is going deep into thousands of industries, making the industry to digital and intelligent transformation. Zhou Hong said that facing the future, Huawei believes that digital technology will grow at a rate of more than a hundred times in more than ten years, and digitalization will promote the accelerated development of people and society.
Multiple lines of business launched new products and strategies, and the "Legion" already produced outputs in areas such as coal mines
"At present, what we have to do is to continue to strengthen our innovation capabilities and firmly seize the two major opportunities of digitalization, intelligent development and low-carbon development of human society." Hu Houkun said that in recent years, although Huawei has faced operational difficulties, its investment in research and development has not decreased but has increased, from 10% of revenue in the past year to 22% last year.
However, regardless of whether Huawei can solve these world-class problems in the future, it now urgently needs to achieve new growth in its main business to build strategic depth for longer-term development. At the conference, Huawei put forward the F5.5G industry vision for the first time in the fixed network field, with the goal of increasing bandwidth, coverage, and experience by more than 10 times. The MetaStudio service launched by HUAWEI CLOUD has moved the entire process of film and television production, such as editing, modeling, and compositing, to the cloud, and seamless off-site collaboration can greatly improve production efficiency and shorten the production cycle of a movie from a few years to several months.
In the terminal field, although key consumer products such as mobile phones are greatly restricted, Huawei is reshaping the user experience in various ways around scenarios such as smart office, sports and health, audio-visual entertainment, smart home, and smart travel. Just last week, Huawei's consumer business was officially renamed "terminal business", and new continents such as commercial terminals became the key markets that Huawei will be going to explore.
Hu Houkun in a speech provided by enterprises
Huawei's various moves in the process of transformation have also aroused widespread concern inside and outside the industry. One of the new words is "legion." On March 30, Huawei held the inaugural meeting of the second batch of "legions" in area K of Shenzhen Bantian Base. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei attended the conference, presented the flag and spoke to Huawei's ten "legions". After the first batch of five legions, the ten legions formed this time belong to the fields of power digitalization, government affairs one network, airports and rails, interactive media, and sports health.
Hu Houkun explained that the legion is actually an integrated team, not only sales, but also requirements management, industry solution development, ecological cooperation and services and other resources, characterized by the fact that each team for a specific industry, can deeply understand the needs of customers.
"Through this new organizational operation model, we shorten the management chain vertically, so that product development can better respond to customer needs, and horizontally help us quickly integrate resources, identify key business scenarios, and integrate huawei and partner products and capabilities to form targeted solutions." Hu Houkun said that the earliest coal mine corps has completed the coal mine operating system based on Hongmeng development with customers, and thanks to the integrated organization of the legion, Huawei can better understand customer needs and respond to customer needs faster.
"In the process of mine development, it took only 3 months from demand research to commercial release, which was unimaginable in the past." Hu Houkun said, "Of course, we are still in a stage of initial exploration and accumulation of experience, and I hope that customers and partners can have more patience and more support." ”
Once again, it is clear that no car is built or chips are made, and it is necessary to rely on system engineering to ensure that the main products are leading
"This year, the difficulties we are facing have not only not decreased, but the changes in the external environment have brought us more difficulties, such as geopolitical conflicts, the global epidemic has not dissipated, global inflation has arrived first, commodity prices have risen, exchange rate fluctuations, etc. are the challenges we may face this year." In the Q&A session after the speech, Hu Houkun and Wang Tao, managing director of Huawei, answered questions from the media.
Hu Houkun and Wang Tao were asked by the media and provided pictures by enterprises
Hu Houkun stressed that despite these difficulties, Huawei has also taken a lot of measures to ensure that the competitiveness of its products, solutions and services does not decline, and from the past two years, customers are generally satisfied. However, he also pointed out that Huawei will also manage the quality of transactions, and for low-quality transactions, Huawei will give up. Although Huawei's business has become more diversified, the company also requires each business to be more focused, and if it cannot achieve quality development, some businesses may also be closed.
In response to the question of Huawei's layout in the automotive field, Hu Houkun bluntly said that huawei will definitely have new car releases this year, whether it is Huawei's smart selection mode or Huawei Inside mode, there will be new product releases, but he did not disclose whether the AITO brand cooperated by Huawei and Cyris will have new car releases. In addition, he reiterated Huawei's positioning of "not building cars": "Our positioning is that of a supplier of smart car components, and what we have to do is to gather our ICT capabilities and help car companies build good cars based on key solutions." ”
Hu Houkun said that Huawei will focus on several key subsystems of the car next, namely intelligent electric, automatic driving, intelligent cockpit, intelligent networking and intelligent vehicle cloud. At present, the upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain based on the cooperation between Hongmeng Cockpit and Huawei have reached more than 300.
When asked about chip-related questions, Hu Houkun directly answered the local: Huawei does not build its own chip factory, and Huawei believes in the global industrial division of labor. Wang Tao further pointed out that the chip industry chain is very long, involving dozens of industrial chains, and any company, including Huawei, cannot solve this problem by itself. To truly solve the chip problem, the whole industry chain needs to work together, and the problem can be solved through a global unified supply chain.
However, Wang Tao also acknowledged Huawei's research in areas such as chip 3D stacking, pointing out that this is a patent that has been applied for in 2019. He said that Huawei's innovative means are three-dimensional and all-round, and they use system engineering methods to carry out research and development. Through the reconstruction of basic theory and software and hardware, Huawei is confident that it will maintain the leading position of its main products in the next few years.
Even if advanced process chips are still difficult to obtain, it is clear that the technology and business toolbox in Huawei's hands still have considerable depth. Huawei's investment in areas such as "10 issues and challenges for the future" will also make it one of the farthest and fastest players in the ICT field after it sails out of the storm.
Beijing News shell financial reporter promised
Edited by Bai Huabing Proofreader Fu Chunyan