Han Ximin

ximhan@126.com

SHENZHEN-BASED Huawei Technologies had secured 40 commercial 5G contracts as of Monday, and aims to develop simple, powerful and intelligent networks to continuously create value for its customers.

At its 16th annual Global Analyst Summit in Shenzhen, Ken Hu Houkun, rotating chairman of Huawei, said the firm will continue to pursue innovation and invest in the future. The ultimate goal is to bring the benefits of a fully connected, intelligent world to more people, homes and organizations.

As the world’s largest telecom equipment provider, the company has shipped as many as 70,000 5G base stations and secured 40 commercial contracts.

“5G is being deployed much faster than expected. The 5G device development is matching 5G network development for the first time in history. The world will have 2.8 billion 5G users by 2025,” Hu said at the meeting with more than 600 participants, where he shared the company’s insight into industry trends and strategic determination.

The wide adoption of AI is accelerating cloud adoption in enterprises. As part of Huawei’s larger market position, Hu explained, they consider cloud competition to actually be AI competition. With the company’s strategic investment in AI, Hu noted “we believe in leading the race in the new cloud track.”

Describing the external challenges, Hu said cybersecurity is in essence a technical issue and less a geopolitical issue.

“Politicization isn’t only a big challenge for Huawei but also an issue for the wider industry and trade relations on a large scale,” Hu said.

“Politicizing moves us away from fact-based judgments. It will bring fragmentation risks for technology development and it is a challenge to the world,” Hu said.

“As for other countries, Huawei has been actively taking part in their 5G rollout, and we won’t see a big change in terms of our geographic involvement at the global scale,” he added.

William Xu, director of the board and president of Huawei’s Institute of Strategic Research, announced that Huawei is moving into the era of “Innovation 2.0,” which is all about vision-driven theoretical breakthroughs and inventions.

Xu said Huawei will work with universities and research institutes to drive innovation in theories and basic technologies, and light the way for the industry and the world at large.

According to Xu, to drive industry innovation and upgrading, Huawei is committed to leading in five areas: redefining the technical architecture, redefining the product architecture, leading the pace of industry development, setting a new industry direction and fostering a new industry.

“Connectivity, computing and cloud will be the underlying infrastructure of the intelligent world, and AI will power this new world,” said David Wang, president of ICT Strategy & Marketing at Huawei.

“Looking to the future, we will build the best hybrid cloud for industry digitization, and use full-stack, all-scenario AI solutions to make AI pervasive,” said Wang. In 2018, the company invested 100 billion yuan (US$14.90 billion) in research and development, ranking fifth globally on the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard.

Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. The company’s sales revenue rounded off at 721.2 billion yuan last year, up 19.5 percent year on year.