Huawei Zhang Pingan: Huawei was forced to become an ecological company

At the 2021 Huawei Developer Conference, one of the most noteworthy hotspots is the development of the HMS ecosystem. After three years, Huawei's HMS ecosystem finally ranks first in the global mobile application ecosystem.

On October 23, the author had an in-depth exchange with Zhang Pingan, President of HUAWEI Consumer Cloud Service and CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD, and heads of various departments of HUAWEI Consumer Cloud Services, trying to find the secret of the rise of the HMS ecosystem.

Huawei people are accustomed to crowning the HMS ecosystem with a "new" word, calling it "HMS new ecology", why? Zhang Pingan said that the meaning of "new" is that this ecology does not depend on any country, the new ecology includes the application ecological base and the cloud base, and Huawei has developed its own technology to build a new ecological base for the future.

For example, search and maps are key parts of this pedestal. After Huawei can't use GMS, it means that Huawei's mobile phone users can no longer use Google Maps and Google Search. At this time, Huawei has only one way, that is, to make its own search and map. Although the investment is huge, Huawei has no way back. "We are determined to take this path, not from the perspective of commercial benefits, from the perspective of the future digital ecosystem, any Chinese application wants to go out, or the digitization of many overseas countries, will help a lot." Zhang Pingan said.

In the past three years, Huawei has grown from zero breakthroughs in search and maps. You Peng, President of HUAWEI Consumer Cloud Service Search and Map BU, revealed that Huawei's Petal Search has been launched in more than 170 countries overseas, supporting more than 70 languages, with a cumulative user of more than 100 million and more than 32 million monthly active users. Huawei has done the hardest thing, and after becoming a capability, it is also open to the outside world and empowers developers. For example, there is a developer of overseas e-commerce, after integrating the search service, to achieve Arabic, Spanish product search, improve the GMV.

The same is true of maps, petal maps have been launched in 160 countries overseas, support 70 languages, and have more than 20 million monthly active users. Moreover, it provides many innovative features, such as lane-level guidance capabilities, which are very popular with overseas consumers.

When it comes to the rise of the HMS ecology, it is impossible not to mention the "Battle of Songhu". In 2019, Huawei organized thousands of R&D personnel to conduct a "Battle of Songhu" on the shore of Songshan Lake in Dongguan to complete HMS Core's API services. At that time, Zhang Pingan once commented: "This is the highest standard, the largest number of participants, and the most challenging battle in Huawei's history." ”

Will the Battle of Pine Lake continue in the future? On this issue, Zhang Pingan said that the Battle of Songhu will continue, and the future will mainly focus on search, maps and other aspects.

It seems that Huawei will continue to innovate in search and map.

With the opening of HMS Core, in the words of Zhang Pingan, "Huawei was forced to become an ecological company." In this process, he believes, the most important thing is the change of thinking, "the greatest company is not a product company, but an ecological company, without this battle we have no idea how important ecology is." In 2018, we began to try to get the Huawei application market online overseas, and many people have worries and concerns, and today this statement has disappeared. ”

Huawei's development in search and maps also shows that as long as you dare to innovate, opportunities always exist. In the Internet industry, there is a view that "winners take all", but Zhang Pingan does not agree with this point of view, he said, looking at the Chinese Internet, everyone said that there was no chance, but the new generation continues to appear and grow, and doing a business is not to see whether others have it, but to see whether the market needs it.

Regarding the practice of many applications spending money to buy traffic, Zhang Pingan also has a different view, he said, Huawei's idea is not to take the initiative to spend a lot of money to do, we hope that everything will go naturally, "the product will be done well, if consumers feel that the experience is good, they will be willing to download."

At present, HMS Core has established a new goal, that is, "out-of-the-box", that is, supporting different operating systems and different terminals. In the words of Zhang Pingan, "This is something that must be done, so that the ecological base is good." ”

Of course, Huawei's approach is still to insist on doing a good job in products and using experience to achieve "out-of-the-end", all of which are worth looking forward to.