Huawei's performance is gratifying, and the development of chips is restricted
In 2023, Huawei achieved encouraging results. According to the latest annual report, Huawei's global sales revenue reached 704.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.63%, which is the largest annual increase since 2019. Net profit climbed sharply to 87 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 144.5%. This gratifying performance is largely attributable to the steady development of Huawei's various business segments.
The ICT infrastructure business achieved sales revenue of 362 billion yuan, up 2.3% year-on-year, the terminal business performed well, with sales revenue of 251.5 billion yuan, up 17.3% year-on-year, the cloud computing and digital energy businesses achieved growth of 21.9% and 3.5% respectively, and the intelligent vehicle solution business also began to enter the stage of large-scale delivery, with sales revenue soaring by 128.1% year-on-year.
Impressively, despite the severe sanctions from the United States, Huawei still insists on investing heavily in core technology areas such as chips. In 2023, Huawei's R&D investment will reach 164.7 billion yuan, accounting for 23.4% of its annual revenue, and its cumulative R&D expenditure over the past 10 years will exceed 1.11 trillion yuan. This reflects Huawei's dedication and determination to innovate independently.
Huawei's chip development has not been easy. The United States has always regarded Huawei as a "security threat", and has continuously increased its technological blockade of Huawei, pushing allies to restrict the export of relevant chip technology and equipment to Huawei. This will undoubtedly bring severe challenges to the development of Huawei's chips.
In the face of many difficulties, Huawei is actively responding. On the one hand, we will increase investment in independent research and development, and on the other hand, we will open up the ecosystem extensively and achieve mutual benefit and win-win results with 46,000 partners. How Huawei will achieve breakthroughs in core technologies such as chips is the focus of widespread attention in the industry.
Huawei's large-scale production of its own chips has detonated the technology industry
In order to get rid of external dependence and achieve independent and controllable chips, Huawei is increasing its own chip R&D and production efforts.
According to Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, revealed at the 2023 annual division conference, Huawei plans to produce 158 billion self-developed chips in the next three years. This huge chip production scale will strongly support Huawei's development needs in 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other fields.
Huawei has made great progress in self-research and development of chips. In 2023, Huawei's self-developed Kirin 9000 series 5G chips will ship more than 200 million units, performing well in the smartphone field. Huawei has also successfully built the Ascend series of ARM instruction set chips suitable for various scenarios such as servers and switches.
The person pointed out that Huawei's determination to produce its own chips on a large scale will have a far-reaching impact on the global chip industry pattern. On the one hand, this will promote the upstream and downstream enterprises of the chip industry chain to accelerate the layout and form a new industrial ecology, and on the other hand, it will also promote technological innovation and breakthroughs in chip design and manufacturing.
Huawei is also facing many challenges on the road to chip independence. Limitations of the process level of Yuyu semiconductors. At present, the most advanced process technology used by Huawei's independent chips is only 5nm, which is still a certain gap compared with the 3nm and 2nm processes of leading manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung.
The shortage of talents is also a major bottleneck restricting the development of Huawei's chips. Huawei currently has nearly 10,000 chip designers, but it is still far from meeting the needs of large-scale production.
In the face of these difficulties, Huawei is taking a variety of countermeasures. The first is to increase investment in chip research and development, with chip research and development expenses of up to 30 billion yuan in 2023; the second is to actively open up cooperation and establish close alliances with upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain; the third is to vigorously introduce talents and expand the chip talent team through a combination of internal training and external introduction.
Industry insiders believe that Huawei's determination to produce its own chips on a large scale will bring new vitality to the global chip industry and accelerate the reshaping and innovation of the chip industry chain. However, Huawei also needs to increase investment in process level, design tools, and talent team to truly achieve the goal of independent and controllable chips.
Chip autonomy is of great significance, and Huawei is determined
Huawei's determination to mass-produce its own chips is of great significance to the development of science and technology in China and the world.
This will greatly enhance China's independent innovation capability in core technology fields such as chips. For a long time, China has been "stuck in the neck" problem in the field of chips, which is controlled by others. Through independent research and development and production of chips, China will gradually get rid of its dependence on foreign countries and truly master the core technology. This is not only related to national security and scientific and technological development, but also the only way to achieve high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance.
Huawei's chip autonomy will promote the development and innovation of the entire chip industry chain. In order to meet the demand for large-scale chip production, upstream design, manufacturing, materials and equipment companies will gain huge development opportunities, and downstream terminal manufacturers will also benefit from it, forming a virtuous circle. All links of the chip industry chain will also usher in a new round of technological breakthroughs and innovations.
Huawei's chip autonomy will inject new impetus into global technology development. As the world's leading technology company, Huawei's innovations in core technologies such as chips will surely radiate and promote the development and progress of the entire industry. This will help build a more open, inclusive and cooperative global science and technology ecosystem.
In order to truly realize chip independence, Huawei still needs to continue to make efforts in many aspects. The first is to increase R&D investment and maintain innovation vitality, the second is to strengthen the construction of talent team and create a high-level chip talent echelon, strengthen open cooperation, integrate global resources, and form a joint force.
It is worth noting that Huawei's road to chip autonomy is not achieved overnight. The person pointed out that it will take at least 5-10 years to fully realize the independence and controllability of chips. However, judging from the progress made by Huawei in the past few years in the fields of mobile phone chips and server chips, this goal is completely achievable.
Huawei's determination to mass-produce its own chips marks a solid step forward in China's independent innovation of core technologies. This will not only promote the overall improvement of China's scientific and technological strength, but also inject new impetus into the global scientific and technological development. It is believed that with the unremitting efforts of Huawei and the entire technology community, the goal of chip autonomy will eventually be achieved.