According to 36 Krypton reports, on the afternoon of April 30, Huawei issued an internal personnel adjustment document, announcing that Yu Chengdong will step down as CEO of Huawei terminal BG and still retain the position of chairman of terminal BG. He Gang, former Huawei Device BG and Chief Operating Officer, took over as CEO of Huawei Device BG.
In this regard, people familiar with the matter told the Blue Whale News reporter that the adjustment to the normal management appointment is to allow Yu Chengdong to have more energy to create high-quality products for consumers. In addition, according to public information, in Huawei's internal structure, there was no chairman of the terminal BG, and Yu Chengdong held it for the first time.
After this reshuffle, Yu Chengdong will be the Executive Director of Huawei, the Chairman of the Device BG, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU, and the Director of the Intelligent Device and Intelligent Vehicle Components IRB.
Yu Chengdong was born in 1969 in Huoqiu County, western Anhui Province, to authentic farmers. In 1987, Yu Chengdong was admitted to the Department of Automatic Control of Northwestern Polytechnical University with the first grade in the county's engineering, and later successfully obtained a master's degree from Tsinghua University. After graduating from Tsinghua University in 1993, Yu Chengdong came to Shenzhen, the forefront of reform and opening up, as a member of the "Xiahai Tide" in the 90s, and joined Huawei, a private company with less than 200 employees. Initially, Yu Chengdong, who graduated from the Department of Automatic Control, joined Huawei's program-controlled switch development as a technician. Since then, he has changed from a technician to a salesman, often taking products to all parts of the country.
Since then, Yu Chengdong has served as Director of 3G Products, Vice President of Wireless Product Marketing, President of Wireless Product Line, and President of the European Region of Huawei. In 2010, Yu Chengdong returned to China and served as President of Strategy & Marketing at Huawei. In 2011, Yu Chengdong took over Huawei's terminal and consumer business. In November 2020, Yu Chengdong served as the director of the IRB of intelligent terminals and intelligent automotive components. In the same year, Yu Chengdong was responsible for the integration of Huawei's consumer BG and intelligent vehicle solution BU, and since then, Yu Chengdong has been officially responsible for promoting the development of Huawei's smart car and intelligent car BU business. In the past three years, Huawei has successfully cooperated with car companies such as Celis, Chery, BAIC, and JAC, and launched four major HarmonyOS Zhixing (formerly known as Smart Car) brands.
On March 16 this year, Yu Chengdong, Executive Director of Huawei, CEO of Device BG, and Chairman of Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU, revealed that in the first three months of 2024, Huawei's smart car business has turned losses into profits, and the car BU is still close to the edge of breakeven, and it is expected to achieve benign positive development from April.
He stressed that if you keep losing money, you can't continue to do business. Yu Chengdong said that in the past few years, Huawei's car BU has continued to lose 10 billion yuan and 8 billion yuan, and will reduce its loss by 2 billion yuan in 2023 to 6 billion yuan.
On July 7, 2022, at the China Automotive Blue Book Forum, Yu Chengdong revealed that the car business is currently Huawei's only loss-making business, and it is also a money-burning business, Huawei invests more than one billion dollars in research and development every year, and has as many as 10,000 direct and indirect R&D personnel, of which 70% of R&D personnel are in the research and development of intelligent assisted driving. In February 2023, Yu Chengdong revealed in an interview with the media that Huawei's car BU will achieve the goal of profitability by 2025. Previously, Yu Chengdong said, "The profit target for 2025 is what we took the initiative to put forward to the company, but it is actually quite challenging." "The reason why he has such a goal is that Yu Chengdong is also under a lot of pressure to do the car business within Huawei.
There is also a lot of debate within Huawei about Huawei's car business. On March 31, 2023, Ren Zhengfei signed the "5 years no car" decision-making order, Yu Chengdong reluctantly left a message on the internal forum, "Let's see it in a few years", and on April 1, Meng Wanzhou took office as Huawei's rotating chairman, and Meng Wanzhou's harsh criticism of Yu Chengdong circulated on the Internet. At the press conference of Huawei's 2022 annual report, Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, said, "Some departments, individuals, or partners are abusing the Huawei brand, and in the process of investigating and dealing with this matter, the brand that Huawei has built over the past 30 years will not be abused by anyone." Anyone with a discerning eye can see that this should be talking about Yu Chengdong.
On the evening of the same day, he left a message in Huawei's Voice Community, saying: "Only by having in-depth insight and deep understanding of an industry can we grasp the right direction! Mark it and look at it in a few years!"
▲Yu Chengdong's two messages in Huawei's Voice Community.
Huawei was sanctioned by the United States in 2019, and the once-prosperous mobile phone business suffered a devastating blow, and Huawei, which has technical reserves, entered the automotive industry. In 2022, Huawei's investment in the automotive business will be 10.3 billion yuan, of which the revenue will be 2.077 billion yuan, and the loss will be more than 8.2 billion yuan. You must know that Huawei's net profit of 35.6 billion yuan in 2022 is almost the lowest in the past, so in 2022, Huawei has been emphasizing "survival", and at the same time, it has also made several leadership adjustments to the car BU business with a loss of 8.2 billion yuan. Last year, when the new M7 was more than 7,000 units in a single day, Yu Chengdong sighed in the circle of friends: "It's not easy to come back to life!" Now think about it, Yu Chengdong must have breathed a sigh of relief when he got the data at that time, after all, the annual loss of nearly 10 billion yuan is indeed very stressful.