Huawei's first detailed explanation of the establishment of the legion "before and behind the scenes"

Author| Yu Huiru Editor| Luo Lijuan

"In the practice of helping customers digitally transform, Huawei found that customers' problems and Huawei's technology could not be well matched. On the one hand, existing technologies cannot meet the needs of customers, on the other hand, even if some technology customers want to use, but there is no way to effectively combine them to form a solution. At the 2022 analyst conference, Hu Houkun, Huawei's rotating chairman, explained the reasons why Huawei established the legion.

He said that the legion is an integrated team that includes resources such as sales, demand management, industry solution development, ecological cooperation, and services. It is characterized by the ability of each team to understand the needs of its customers for a specific industry.

Huawei Rotating Chairman Hu Houkun

Through this new organizational operation model, Huawei shortens the management chain vertically, allowing product development to better respond to customer needs, rapidly integrating resources horizontally, identifying key business scenarios, and integrating huawei and partner products and capabilities to form targeted solutions.

At the end of October 2021, Huawei held an oath-taking ceremony for the five major legions - the Coal Mine Corps, the Smart Highway Corps, the Customs and Port Corps, the Smart Photovoltaic Corps, and the Data Center Energy Corps in Songshan Lake Park, revealing for the first time the development vision of Huawei's five legions.

These five legions are directly led by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and belong to the same level as Huawei's three major business operators BG, enterprise BG, and consumer BG.

Five months later, Huawei's ten new legions include the Power Digital Corps, the Government One Netcom Corps, the Airports and Orbits Corps, the Interactive Media (Music) Corps, the Sports Health Corps, the Display Core Corps, the Park Corps, the WIDE Area Network Corps, the Data Center Dock Corps, and the Digital Sites Corps.

Since the establishment of the first batch of legions, Huawei's legion has attracted a lot of attention from the outside world, and this new organization is also considered to be an organizational change carried out by Huawei in the current environment.

On April 27, Chen Banghua, vice president of Huawei Enterprise BG, Sun Fuyou, CEO of Huawei Enterprise BG Power DigitalIzation Corps, and Cheng Gang, Director of Huawei Enterprise BG Strategy and Business Development Department, explained to the outside world for the first time the "front of and behind the scenes" of Huawei's establishment of the Team.

The following is the dialogue between Chen Banghua, Sun Fuyou, Cheng Gang and the media (edited by all-weather science and technology, with deletions)

Three factors are considered in choosing a clan core

Q: Huawei has been establishing the Legion for more than half a year, and there are many partners involved in this business, as well as a series of local and policy environments. What's the biggest problem?

Chen Banghua: Just now I also talked about why Huawei set up a legion, because in the past, Huawei had an industry business department, for example, we had a transportation business department, but in the past, the business scope of our business department was relatively large, spanning more sub-industries. For example, transportation includes aviation, airports, highways, tracks, ports, etc., when it crosses more industries, it is more difficult for us to focus on going deep into a sub-industry to see the pain points of customers, and then match our solutions. So we set up the legion, there is a very core purpose, is to focus on a small sub-industry, go deep into the scene of this industry, see the customer's pain points, and then put our existing products and solutions, as well as around the customer's pain points to create some new products and solutions, which is a very core purpose of the establishment of the legion.

Second, according to General Hu's remarks, the purpose of establishing a corps is to solve the problem of one vertical and one horizontal. Vertically, we hope to put the previous back-end R & D organization, even the 2012 organization, so that they can participate in the battlefield as much as possible, directly into the front-line scene.

In addition, there is the progress, although we have established the legion for only half a year, some legions have only been a few months, as the minister of marketing and solutions of several of our legions just said, we have achieved some results, such as automatic driving in Tianjin Port, personnel fit programs in the smart highway, there have been some preliminary effects, including the all-optical industrial network in the coal legion, some preliminary results, of course, there is a long way to go, we want to do this work deeply, There's a lot of work to do with a partner.

Q: Huawei's newly established legion direction is basically a traditional industry, can you talk about what is the industry standard selected by the legion?

Chen Banghua: There are three factors that Huawei considers the core consideration of choosing the legion:

One is that the space in this industry should be large enough, which means that there are many customers in this industry who hope or will use digital transformation solutions in the future. Because our legion itself is also a commercial organization, we also pursue our own business goals.

Second, in this legion, the products and solutions it will use are not in line with the main channel of Huawei's product investment. In many industries, it may also be doing transformation, but if its products and solutions are not the direction of Huawei's investment in the industry, this will not be a condition for us to choose the legion. Huawei's industry, the core is connectivity, computing, cloud, if the industry needs products and solutions are in line with our direction, it will become our choice.

Third, we will appropriately refer to the stage of digital transformation in this industry, or the level at which it is located. As I just said in the speech material, because some industries have a fast pace of digital transformation, and some have a relatively slow pace. What we want to choose is just that this industry has a more urgent need for digital transformation, and it is in a more active industry. For industries where digital transformation is relatively mature, or industries that have not yet started much, our priorities are relatively low. These are some of the main considerations for considering the formation of a legion.

Q: What problems did each legion encounter when it came to drawing and selecting personnel, and how did they solve them?

Chen Banghua: Before we set up the legion, we actually had a corresponding industry business department. For example, in the past we had the Transportation Business Department, which had aviation, roads, and railways under this department. The department that Mr. Sun was responsible for was formerly called the Energy Business Department, and there were electricity, oil and gas under it, and this part of the team was there. When we formed the legion according to the sub-industry, he naturally entered our corresponding legion, which solved the main problem.

There is also a part of our legion that the company as a whole supports, so we will have a group of people who have done product research and development before, and even do technical research, and will selectively enter the legion. Of course, the legion itself is not a huge organization, we generally have a legion of dozens to more than a hundred people in size, it is more of a solution to build the organization, and then to pull through the company's resources.

The previous business department was mainly placed in BG, in fact, sales and service-oriented, the legion organization needs to supplement the people, mainly to understand research and development, understand technology, understand the product of the people, only in this way can it be possible to provide solutions when insight into the customer's pain points.

Collaboration & Responsibility Differentiation

Q: Some of the 15 legions are industry-oriented, such as airports and rails, and some are enterprise-oriented product portfolios, such as the Digital Occupation Legion. If they are all working hard to solve the scene of the industry, what is the division of responsibilities between them, and how to form a collaboration?

Chen Banghua: It is true that we have two types of legions, one is the industry corps, the other is the industry corps, or some are called product combination corps.

Inside our industry corps is an end-to-end organization, that is, research, camp, sales, and service are all there, they are directly interspersed to the corresponding representative offices, to the provinces or cities to fight with the representative offices, its organization is complete.

The legion of our product portfolio is mainly biased to build the program, which has two ways to create a plan in the first line, one way is that it is directly deliverable to customers, such as the solution of the smart park, it is directly to the front-line representative office for sales, and the second is to eventually integrate into the industry solutions of each legion, listed in this way, they are such a synergy.

Sun Fuyou: Just in the power industry, it involves the cooperation between the power digital corps and multiple legions, for example, our cooperation with digital energy, the power digital corps is an industry-oriented organization, focusing on the digitalization and digital transformation of the power industry, helping the industry energy transformation and zero-carbon transformation, we are an industry-oriented organization, an entity responsible for customers in the power industry; digital energy is a subsidiary of Huawei, which is to sell products that combine power electronics technology and digital technology to thousands of industries, and is an industrial-type organization. We surround each other around some specific scenarios, more of a collaborative and collaborative relationship, such as for the integrated energy scenario, we will build a systematic solution, we will integrate our smart campus solution as a base, and at the same time, according to the actual situation, according to the actual situation, on-demand selection of digital energy and other internal and external partners products and programs.

Q: How do you cooperate with the team or local representative offices within the original corporate BG?

Cheng Gang: In fact, Huawei is engaged in this kind of legion reform, which is not a single-point change that is only for sub-industries, but actually a change we have made for the industry on the basis of a large systematic change of Huawei. This big change is that Huawei will emphasize that we will authorize more at the level of representative offices, which is the new mode of operation proposed by General Manager Ren, and we must strengthen the new combat mode of representative offices, small organs, and large platforms. We stressed several times at the corps's oath meeting that the corps is a field army, it is not a very thick concentration of various resources, our resources are more at the level of the representative office, the corps is more integrated with scientists, engineers, experts, to form a capable team, to interspersed with the representative office to fight, it is a vertical and horizontal pull through.

In this case, a lot of our decision-making power is actually granted to the representative office, the representative office is more from the revenue to the profit to the strategic goal of the landing of the organization, the legion is more oriented to strategic expansion, facing the campaign, facing the empowerment of the representative office. In the case of this new organizational structure, our company is also groping for how to better delegate delegations and corps, including our assessment rights and incentive rights.

Legion is the most important business change direction in the future

Q: Now that the competition in the digital market is very fierce, when enterprise businesses seek new growth points, will they find some new space around the direction of the legion, or will there be some new strategic focus?

Chen Banghua: In the past few years, Huawei's enterprise business has maintained a relatively good growth, especially overseas, we achieved nearly 20% growth in 2021, but we also saw that the domestic growth in 2021 is not up to expectations. It is precisely for this reason that we hope to set up legions in many sub-industries to further solve customer problems through legions. Because huawei's products and solutions in the past, it may be relatively versatile, it may be used in many industries, only we really penetrate into a subdivision of the industry, such as coal, highways, ports, may be able to find more opportunities for us to serve customers, but also drive our own revenue growth. In short, our legion is the most important direction of business change for the company in the future.

Q: Everyone is still curious about the operation of the Legion, how many people are in the Power Digital Legion team? Will you set some short- or long-term growth goals?

Sun Fuyou: The Power Digital Corps was officially established on March 30, and it is still in its infancy. For the power digital legion, we are positioned in this way: the purpose of the legion reform is to shorten the connection between customer needs and solutions, product development and maintenance, quickly open up a concise delivery process, and reduce misleading and loss in transmission.

We believe that resources are limited, customer needs are unlimited, only focus can be aimed at key business scenarios, focus can be deep, thorough, strong, bigger, so our work this year's focus will be around "1 +3 + 1", directly hit the pain points of power companies, in-depth business scenarios, help them solve problems.

Our legion has a comparative systematic transformation methodology in the power industry, at the 2020 HC conference we released the methodology of energy digital transformation, and in 2021 we also released the energy ternary transformation methodology at the HC conference, which is the first aspect, at the methodological level.

The second is to combine some of the key pain points of the industry in the field of digitalization, and we also provide corresponding industry reference architectures, such as the Spark architecture.

The third is to combine Huawei's existing cloud services, ICT products (such as wavelength division, digital communication, etc.), and terminals, and we combine Huawei's key digital capabilities with the scenarios we focus on to achieve ultimate business success in the process of helping customers solve problems and create value. For Huawei, our team will aggregate Huawei's key technologies and resources in the field of digitalization, including HiSilicon Semiconductor, 2012 Laboratory, Terminal, ICT, cloud, etc., and work together with partners to work around customers. For the entire power industry, we emphasize the digitalization and digital transformation of the industry to help the energy transition and zero-carbon transformation. Internal horizontal and rapid integration of resources, so that Huawei's related product solutions and partners can provide customers with more efficient solutions.

Fourth, the partners in the power industry are very professional, the ability is also very strong, and we will form a very good complementary model, we also believe that only with the partners in these fields of in-depth cooperation, we really form a symbiotic, win-win ecology, in order to better solve problems and create value for the power industry.

Chen Banghua: After entering each sub-industry, first of all, we still have to clarify the customer's scene, for the customer's scene to make our solutions, and this insight into the scene, find the pain points, step by step to build the program process, we have a certain patience, we do not expect to set up a legion today, tomorrow our income will achieve double, quadruple growth. In the long run, we have certain expectations, but in the short term, we also have enough patience, we first do a good job in products and solutions.

Chenggang: Our power corps and coal corps have always been in line with Huawei's proposal, creating value for customers and partners through the way of the legion, and finally ensuring that our legion model or Huawei's long-term closed loop for the government and enterprise business model, this is whether it is for the legion or the traditional system department to operate, in fact, each of them has its own very ambitious business plan, but for us, we hope to focus on the sub-scene of the industry thoroughly, deeply, so that there can be a longer-term, Potential and energy for continuous development.