Reporter of this magazine/Zhao Yiwei
" Huawei is now facing great difficulties. The continuous suppression has brought great pressure to our operations, and survival is our main line. Since Huawei only ended the procurement and inventory of all chips on September 15, the inventory data is still in the process of evaluating." On September 23, Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping said at the 2020 Huawei Full Connection Conference. This is the first response from Huawei executives to the company's current status and chip reserves after the US's new round of chip sanctions against Huawei came into effect on September 15.
From September 23 to September 26, Huawei held the 5th Huawei Full Connection Conference in Shanghai. Focusing on "cloud + AI + 5G + IoT", it is expected to release the latest AI and cloud products and solutions to further improve Huawei's entire ecosystem construction. This is Huawei's annual global annual conference for the ICT industry every year, and it is also a common platform for Huawei to release major company-level strategies. Previously, AI and computing strategies were released during the conference.
In May 2019, the United States included Huawei on the "entity list"; on May 15 this year, it further upgraded its regulatory measures and formulated a ban on Huawei's chip supply chain; after a 120-day ban buffer period, on September 15, the United States' chip ban on Huawei's company officially came into effect. Chip manufacturers including TSMC, Qualcomm , Samsung and others announced that they would no longer supply chips to Huawei.
After a year and a half of continuous suppression, Huawei is looking for ways to alleviate the current crisis from multiple business levels, including shifting its business focus to application scenario solutions for technical advantages in 5G, cloud, AI, computing, etc., and launching smart ecological products such as private brand displays.
Speaking of the future, Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping emphasized: "Huawei will use all its strength to help the supply chain. We are still willing to purchase products from American companies. We will continue to adhere to the global and diversified procurement strategy. The mutual trust, mutual benefit and division of labor and cooperation model of the ICT industry are the most conducive to the development of the global industry."
mobile phone chips are still looking for solutions
On August 17 this year, the US Department of Commerce announced a new round of sanctions against Huawei, requiring all chips to be designed or manufactured using American technology, and before being sold to Huawei, they must obtain permission from the US government. The regulations officially came into effect on September 15, resulting in Japanese and Korean manufacturers and others being forced to suspend supply to Huawei.
Previously, in May 2019, the US Department of Commerce included Huawei in the entity list for the first time, and Huawei began to use its own chip HiSilicon to "domestic replacement". In May this year, the US government further escalated sanctions, resulting in the restriction of cooperation between upstream chip foundry companies such as TSMC and SMIC and Huawei.
new ban cut off Huawei's path to seeking cooperation with non-US suppliers and further blocked Huawei's possibility of obtaining chips. The chips designed by Huawei cannot be manufactured, and the chips produced by others cannot be purchased. For a time, Huawei faced the dilemma of "no chip available".
"The three changes to legal sanctions in the United States have indeed brought great difficulties to our production and operations, but the specific data is still in the process of evaluation." At the Huawei Full Connection 2020 Conference, Huawei's rotating chairman Guo Ping said.
Regarding the existing chip inventory, Guo Ping revealed that for the 2B business including base stations, chip reserves are relatively sufficient. Huawei hopes to combine connection, computing, artificial intelligence, and industry applications to create value for customers, which has huge opportunities in this regard.
With relatively sufficient reserves of B-side business chips, Huawei is actively seeking solutions to diversify its product lines. At the full connection conference, Wang Yinfeng, president of Huawei's tablet and PC product line, confirmed that Huawei will launch its own brand display products and will also launch consumer-grade desktop products in the future. Previously, Huawei also announced the launch of commercial desktops within the year. There was news that Huawei desktops will be equipped with the domestic Kunpeng 920 processor and pre-installed with the domestic Galaxy Kirin operating system.
In addition, smart hardware will also become a new focus.It is reported that Huawei may outsource the production tasks of standard display products (non-surface) to ODM subsidiaries of , BOE , and subcontract the manufacturing tasks of curved screen displays for the gaming market to Guanjie Technology.
As for mobile phone chips, Guo Ping said at the full connection conference that because Huawei consumes hundreds of millions of mobile phone chips every year, Huawei is still actively looking for solutions for mobile phone chip-related reserves.
"American manufacturers are actively applying for supply licenses from the US government." Guo Ping revealed that Qualcomm has applied to the US Department of Commerce for export licenses to continue supplying to Huawei. If the application is approved, Huawei will be happy to use Qualcomm chips to make Huawei mobile phone and continue to purchase American chips.
"Qualcomm has always been an important partner of Huawei. Huawei has been purchasing Qualcomm chips in the past decade. Huawei has strong chip design capabilities and is willing to help the trusted supply chain enhance their chip manufacturing, equipment, and materials capabilities, and helping them is also helping ourselves." Guo Ping said.
Guo Ping stressed that the US ban is bringing a heavy blow to the global semiconductor industry. According to Japanese media reports, the ban on Huawei may cause Japanese companies to lose up to 1 trillion yen; the American Semiconductor Association and the International Semiconductor Association also expressed concerns about the US government's actions, which also put huge restrictions on chip sales of American companies.
Yu Chengdong also previously stated that China still has a big gap with the United States and other countries in terms of industrial chain depth and core technologies. Especially in terms of underlying materials, manufacturing equipment, operating systems, ecological platforms, etc., the United States still dominates the world.
"We hope the US government will reconsider the policy. If we allow continued purchases, we will continue to adhere to the global procurement strategy." In the speech, Guo Ping also mentioned the recent information about supply chains and Huawei's determination. "In terms of strengthening the supply chain, Huawei advocates growing together with suppliers and sharing benefits. Huawei's most important blow in recent times is the opponent's blow to Huawei's supply chain. Huawei will use all its strength to help the supply chain strengthen and grow. Helping the supply chain strengthen and grow is to help Huawei itself."
Ecological Strategy
Under the heavy pressure, Huawei's C-end business was blocked, and the B-end business became a new focus that attracted much attention.
"We see that the ICT industry is facing huge development opportunities, and the government and enterprises have fully entered digitalization and intelligence. Huawei hopes to open a new chapter with its partners." Guo Ping said.
The most popular case is the Pengcheng Intelligent Body that Huawei is building with Shenzhen. "Huawei will leverage its technological advantages in 5G, cloud, AI, computing, etc. to help Shenzhen create a model of the global digital economy city. We hope that the agent can go from Shenzhen to the whole country, to the world, and to various other industries." said Hou Jinlong, president of Huawei Cloud and Computing BG.
Huawei consumer business cloud service President Zhang Ping'an said that although there will be certain restrictions in the chip field, what Huawei needs to do now is how to continue to do other aspects of innovation under restrictions, including various smart terminal forms in the future, "our R&D team still needs to think about it."
Huawei Cloud's business achievements prove Huawei's confidence. On September 25, Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei Cloud's business, said that Huawei Cloud's annual transaction volume has exceeded 1 billion yuan, and the order volume exceeds 100,000, of which 30 Huawei partners have sales exceed 10 million yuan. The market share of Kunpeng server shipments launched by Huawei partners has exceeded 50%.
From 2016 to the present, the number of developers in Huawei's cloud and computing field has grown from 25,000 to 1.8 million, an increase of more than 70 times. In 2019, Huawei released the "Fertile Land Plan 2.0" and invested 1.5 billion US dollars to develop cloud and computing developers in the next five years. Up to now, Huawei Cloud has launched 210+ cloud services and 210+ solutions to serve global customers, bringing together 1.5 million global developers.
The newly released ModelArts further reflects Huawei's confidence in doing "soft services". On September 25, Huawei released the one-stop AI development platform ModelArts3.0 and the diversity computing series development kit.This is Huawei's long-term basic research based on the three major AI fields of computer vision, speech semantics and decision-making optimization, and the sublimation of more than 600 AI projects practices in more than 10 industries.
As a culmination of Huawei's cloud AI development platform, ModelArts can provide AI application development services including data annotation preparation, model training, model tuning, model deployment and other AI application development services. Shortly after its launch in 2018, it was ranked Stanford DAWNBenchmark. In terms of the total training time of image recognition (ResNet50-on-ImageNet, with a time of 93% or more), it accelerated by nearly 44% from the second place with a time of 10 minutes and 28 seconds, winning the world's first place at that time. After the iteration of version 2.0 in 2019, Huawei Cloud ModelArts has evolved into a simple and professional one-stop AI development and management platform that can even complete model training with 0 code and one-click deployment.
Guo Ping said that the cloud is the best platform to release computing power and the digital base of the intelligent world. After three years of continuous efforts, Huawei Cloud currently has 23 regions around the world and has developed more than 1.5 million developers. "This is not a relief for our cloud team, but a greater pressure because they have to challenge higher goals." Zhang Ping'an, president of Huawei Consumer Business Cloud Service, said that under the restrictions, Huawei Consumer Business will invest more efforts in the construction of various smart terminals and software ecosystems other than mobile phones to serve Huawei's existing 700 million users.
