Huawei's B-side business advances into the "industry jungle": a legion is eyeing a city wall

The establishment of the legion is considered by the industry to be an organizational change made by Huawei in the current environment, and at the 2022 Huawei Global Analyst Conference, the legion model has also become the focus of attention from the outside world.

"The legion was formed to solve the problem of vertical and horizontal. Vertically, we hope to get as close as possible to the former back-end R&D organization to the customer and go directly into the customer's scene. Horizontally, it is hoped to quickly integrate resources, unite more solution partners, and provide customers with scenario-based solutions more efficiently, hoping to synergize as many products as possible through the legion. During the above-mentioned meeting, Chen Banghua, vice president of Huawei's enterprise BG, told the first financial reporter that the core purpose of establishing the legion is to focus on a small sub-industry, and gradually dig out the pain points in the scene.

According to the reporter's understanding, as of now, Huawei has formed more than fifteen legions, covering coal mines, ports, highways, smart photovoltaics, and power digitalization.

Behind the transformation of the legion: quickly assemble resources and cooperate with partners to efficiently serve customers

The "Legion" model comes from the American Internet company Google, and the core is to bring together basic research scientists, technical experts, product experts, engineering experts, sales experts, delivery and service experts all in one department.

According to Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei's redefinition of the legion organization: that is, through the legion operation, break the boundaries of the existing organization, quickly assemble resources, intersperse operations, improve efficiency, do a deep and thorough job in a field, and be responsible for commercial success.

In a speech on the first day of the analyst conference, Hu Houkun, Huawei's rotating chairman, said that the establishment of the legion actually stemmed from the "embarrassment" encountered by Huawei: Huawei has many technical solutions and long product lines, but there are also many problems encountered in customer exchanges.

"We have a bunch of sharp tools, but the combination of tools is not in place. Inspired by the Google Legion, it was decided to set up a Corps, which is an integrated organization, a team is only for one industry, the industry is understood thoroughly, and on this basis, the internal processes are shortened, and targeted solutions are formed. Hu Houkun said.

Chen Banghua told reporters that Huawei has an industry business department, but the previous business scope was relatively large, spanning multiple sub-industries, such as transportation including aviation, airports, highways, railways, ports, etc. At this time, it is difficult to accurately match the customer's pain points with Huawei's solutions, but the legion solved this problem.

Specifically, Huawei's classification of the legion is mainly divided into two types, one is the industry legion, and the other is the industrial corps, or the product combination corps.

"Inside our industry corps is an end-to-end organization, including research, camping, sales, and services, directly interspersed to the corresponding representative offices, to the provinces or cities to fight with the representative offices, and its organization is complete." The legion of the product portfolio is mainly biased towards the creation of solutions, the solution it creates has two ways to be listed on 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 representative office of the first line for sales, and the second is to finally integrate into the industry solutions of each legion, listed in this way, they are such a synergistic relationship. Chen Banghua said.

Taking the Power Digital Corps as an example, the power industry involves the linkage of multiple organizations within Huawei.

"For example, our cooperation with Digital Energy, the Power Digital Corps is an industry-oriented organization, focusing on the digital transformation of the power industry, we are an industry-oriented organization, an entity responsible for customers in the power industry. Digital Energy is a subsidiary of Huawei, which sells products that combine power electronics technology and digital technology to thousands of industries, and is an industrial-type organization. Sun Fuyou, CEO of Huawei's enterprise BG power digital corps, told reporters that the two organizations work directly around specific scenarios, but customers will choose digital energy and products and solutions of other partners inside and outside according to the actual situation.

"Drilling" into sub-industries

Industry digitalization has entered the "deep ploughing" stage, which is Huawei's opportunity, but to win this cake, Huawei needs to change its organizational chain in a short period of time, which is not easy for any large company.

"The rain does not hit the flowers and the flowers are not red, we can't just have clouds in the sky, but it doesn't rain." Or it rains, does not fall on the flowers, customers can not perceive, so we take the reform of the legion, that is, to shorten the connection between customer needs and solutions, product development and maintenance, open up a fast and concise transmission process, and reduce the material consumption and loss in the transmission. Ren Zhengfei said in an internal meeting at the end of March this year that when Huawei is facing more and more stringent suppression, it is necessary to stabilize its position and actively adjust its formation, so it is necessary to adopt flexible strategies and tactics.

Chen Banghua said that in the past few years, Huawei's enterprise business has maintained a relatively good growth, especially overseas achieved nearly 20% growth last year, and in China, The Legion will be the most important business change direction for the company in the future. "The previous business department was mainly placed in BG, in fact, it was mainly sales and service, and the people who needed to be supplemented by the legion organization were mainly people who knew research and development, technology, and products, and only in this way could they provide solutions when they had insight into the pain points of customers."

After the legionization, Huawei's previous investment in the basic field and the technological achievements of talented teenagers and scientists will also be input into various vertical industries through this short chain.

In 2015, Ren Zhengfei once said in an interview: "We are not betting on which technology and which direction we are now, and the route of 'gambling' is only done by small companies, because their investment is not enough." Large companies have enough money to use multi-path, multi-echelon advances in the main channel, and use investment-intensive to shorten the time to explore the direction. Experienced cadres should be transferred to the main line of operations, and a number of new cadres should be transferred to branch operations to continue the offensive. ”

To some extent, the establishment of the Legion model is more like a fast track built by Huawei in difficult times, laying the foundation for the future "granary".