"form a legion"
"more grains"
……
At the 19 Huawei Global Analyst Conference on April 26th, several high-frequency words all revealed the seriousness of the current situation facing Huawei.
"Huawei is still a novice and may make many mistakes." Hu, the rotating chairman of Huawei, responded to the media's words and knocked the "small goal" of smart cars, one of Huawei's new businesses, from high altitude to underground.
Last year, Yu Chengdong, CEO of BU, Huawei's smart car solution, boasted that Huawei would sell 300,000 smart cars in 2022. This small goal exceeds the total delivery of the new force "Wei Xiaoli" of 202 1.
However, as early as April 18, Yu Chengdong changed his mind when interviewed by the media, saying, "It is difficult to achieve the sales target of 300,000 vehicles this year. With the global shortage of car cores, it is impossible to make 300,000 cars. Because there is no supply. We are in the first year. If we can get1200,000 units, it will be a miracle. "
The expansion of new business has been blocked, and the latest disclosed data makes people feel that Huawei has been pushed to the brink.
In 20021year, Huawei's revenue dropped to 636.8 billion, down 28.6% year-on-year. After that, Huawei won the title of "the largest private enterprise in China" for six consecutive years and changed hands.
The latest first quarter data shows that Huawei's revenue has not stopped declining. Revenue in the first quarter was 1, 3 1 billion yuan, down 13.9% year-on-year. The net profit margin was 4.3%, down 6.8 percentage points year-on-year.
But even in the face of the food crisis, Huawei still allowed to raise "Van Gogh" internally. Even Ren said in a dialogue with Huawei researchers:
We allowed Hess to continue climbing the Himalayas. Most of us grow potatoes and eat grass at the foot of the mountain, giving climbers a steady stream of dry food, because rice can't be grown on Mount Everest. This is the mechanism of the company.
What is Mount Everest? Who is that climber? Why can't they fight for food? Can these people lead Huawei out of its survival dilemma?
Two days ago, I went to Huawei to attend 19 Huawei Global Analyst Conference, and finally found the answer.
Huawei has entered a crucial year of self-help and survival. It encourages employees to join the fight of "killing pigs" with scalpels.
How to "kill pigs"? From last year to now, Huawei's biggest move is to form a legion.
At present, 15 official "corps" has been established in coal mines, smart highways, customs ports, smart photovoltaics, data center energy and other fields, and a new corps will be established in May this year.
They carry Huawei's goal of accelerating the commercialization of technology and finding new income space.
Ren Zheng Fei's definition of the Legion is to fight through the Legion, break the existing organizational boundaries, quickly assemble resources, intersperse operations, improve efficiency, deepen a field, be responsible for commercial success, and produce more food for the company.
I learned this trick from Google. Google's legion is a group of doctors, scientists, engineers and marketing experts. There are about fifty or sixty people in this group, and their goal is to be the first in the world.
Some people think that Huawei is "not doing business" and is going to dig coal to generate electricity. In fact, this is not the case at all. Even Huawei, a professional equipment in the coal industry and power industry, can't do it.
Take the Coal Corps as an example. Coal industry is a profiteering industry. Under the background of "double carbon", domestic large and small coal mines have either taken the initiative or been forced to enter the stage of "automatic transformation" or "digital transformation".
Digital transformation of thousands of industries is Huawei's specialty. Ren Zeng said, "There are more than 5,300 coal mines and more than 2,700 metal mines in China. If these 8,000 mines can be done well, Huawei has a lot of room. "
The biggest challenge for the coal industry is safety. For this reason, Huawei has set a goal to help the coal industry achieve "safety, fewer people and no one" through 5G+ artificial intelligence.
It took Huawei only three months from demand research to commercial release, which was unimaginable in the past. In September last year, Huawei and the National Energy Group officially released an intelligent mine operating system called "Kuanghong".
Mine Red Operating System solves the connection problem of various devices in coal mine working environment. In the words of its customers, "these devices knew each other before, and the robot collected data after a trip, which is a step closer to the dream of miners wearing suits and ties to mine coal."
This is also the first time that the operating system of HarmonyOS system has been extended from To C to to To B, and the B-side commercial test has been conducted in the industrial field.
As the saying goes, the east is not bright and the west is bright. After the collapse of the consumer business sector, Huawei re-examined and adjusted its business sector and organizational structure, and new Huawei businesses such as cloud business, digital energy, coal mines, ports and highway corps grew rapidly.
On April 28th, after Huawei announced its revenue data for the first quarter, Hu, Huawei's rotating chairman, said: "The overall operating performance was in line with expectations, the consumer business was greatly affected, and the ICT infrastructure business achieved steady growth."
In addition to the hard battle ahead, Huawei will fight a "protracted war" in the future.
At the conference, Hong Zhou, Dean of Huawei Institute of Strategic Studies, gave a keynote speech-"Future-oriented Scientific Assumption and Business Vision" and described some exciting scenes:
For example, visually, some spiders' eyes are far superior to human eyes in object contour and motion calculation, which is conducive to catching prey quickly and accurately. Is this vision just needed for self-driving cars?
For example, ants, small ant brains generally consume only 0.2 milliwatts of energy. It doesn't need deep learning, nor does it need to follow the computability theory and the Von Neumann framework, but it can run around and do many complicated things, such as nesting, finding food, raising aphids and so on. Don't the computing model bottlenecks and energy consumption problems currently encountered in the AI field need the brains of ants?
These wild ideas, perhaps like Van Gogh's paintings in the19th century, will not be seen for decades or hundreds of years.
But at Huawei, Ren made it clear: "With such a large economic aggregate, some people should be able to' Van Gogh'."
Just a few days ago, Huawei once again recruited "talented teenagers" for the world.
Hu said, "We hope to attract world-class talents with world-class problems to meet challenges and promote scientific and technological progress." There is also a line at the end of the call-up order that mentions "five times the salary".
Popularize science, the salary of talented teenagers is divided into three grades, the highest grade is 1.82 million -20 1 10,000 yuan; The second file is 1.405 million yuan-1.565 million yuan; The third gear is 896,000 yuan-10.008 million yuan.
Heartbeat? Huawei has recruited more than 300 talented teenagers in the past two years.
Walk into Huawei and grab two people at random, one of whom is R&D personnel, accounting for 54.8% of the total number of people in the company. At present, Huawei has at least 700 mathematicians, 800 physicists, 120 chemists and15,000 people engaged in basic research.
These R&D personnel are divided into two groups, one is a scientist and the other is an engineer. The former can concentrate on studying Van Gogh and do some farsighted scientific research.
The latter needs to join the battle of "killing pigs" and make quantitative evaluation according to the hypertrophy degree of "pigs", the breakthrough value of key nodes and the size of "battles". "Pigs" are getting fatter and fatter. According to their military achievements, they have the opportunity to be promoted to "Lieutenant General".
In 20021year, Huawei's R&D investment reached 654.38+042.7 billion yuan, up 22.4% year-on-year, the highest in ten years.
A company that is still trying to "survive" is not a research institute. Why should it raise "Van Gogh"? Why recruit top mathematicians, physicists and chemists from all over the world to study highly abstract mathematical propositions, physical propositions and chemical propositions?
To a great extent, the biggest gap between China and its competitors is not in the field of application and manufacturing, but in the field of basic research.
In the past 200 years, cases of science leading technology abound. Newton's law of motion and Einstein's theory of relativity supported human's space dream, Maxwell's electromagnetic theory laid the foundation of power and electronics industry, and Turing principle and model gave birth to Von Neumann's modern computer architecture.
Huawei's 5G is a similar story.
In 2008, a Turkish mathematician published a mathematical paper. Huawei quickly noticed that the technology could be used for 5G coding, so it quickly organized thousands of people to cooperate with the mathematician and turned a paper into thousands of patents, laying an advantage in 5G in one fell swoop. At present, Huawei's 5G basic patents account for about 27% of the world, ranking first in the world.
At this conference, Huawei also proposed 5.5G, which will provide ubiquitous 10Gigabit experience and hundreds of billions of connections. From the new scene of 5.5G, the uplink ultra-wideband is applied to industries such as machine vision; Broadband real-time interaction, applied to VR and other fields; Fusion sensor communication is mainly used in two scenarios: the Internet of Vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles, to support the demand of autonomous driving.
But Hong Zhou said at the end of his speech, "Today, all our imaginations about digital technology are conservative."
"We are now facing various external difficulties, such as geographical conflicts, exchange rate fluctuations, global epidemics, rising commodity prices and global inflation. These are all tangible and intangible traps that we may encounter in our business activities. " Hu expressed the external environment facing Huawei very thoroughly.
Traps are everywhere, and it is common for heroes to lose their halberds, such as the "small target" of Huawei smart cars.
However, changes in the external environment have not changed Huawei's basic logic-innovation. In the direction of innovation, Huawei has shifted from single-point innovation to system innovation.
Huawei divides innovation into five links: from hypothesis to vision, and then to theory, technology and business innovation.
The closer to the innovation of back-end business, customers and users, the more obvious the effect, such as Huawei's organizational innovation-establishing a legion; The closer you get to the front hypothesis, vision and basic science, the more patience you need. Huawei's Van Gogh does not pick "drooping fruits".
This reminds me of the story of bdelloid rotifer that Ren told employees many times in Huawei.
In the history of science, there is a bdelloid creature that has lived for 80 million years. Many scientists have been studying it for decades. Some scientists are very angry because they can't find male bdelloids. In fact, they have reached the edge of the Nobel Prize. Finally, Belgian scientists found that this is parthenogenesis.
She found that the gene chain of bdelloid rotifer would break, recombine and mutate. Isn't that the best choice? So they survived 80 million years and many disasters.
Scientists say that bdelloid rotifers are close to the state of "being able to survive indefinitely". It can survive in an anhydrous environment for several years without complete dehydration, and will recover after returning to the water. Frozen in the frozen soil for 24,000 years, it can be resurrected.
Ren believes that Huawei's culture, like bdelloid rotifer, is a single gene chain. It is necessary to prevent its entropy increase, precipitation and degradation through various internal changes and "gene fusion", and even hope to gradually establish its ultimate viability and self-evolution ability like bdelloid rotifer.
The more extreme the external conditions, the more we can exercise extreme survival's ability. We have seen some gratifying changes at Huawei:
On April 25th, "Huawei Consumer BG" was officially renamed as "Huawei Terminal BG" and entered the commercial field in an all-round way.
On April 28th, Huawei released the folding flagship mobile phone Huawei Mate Xs 2, and Yu Chengdong said:
"Last year, our mobile phone supply was very difficult. We have good news (this year). The supply of Huawei mobile phones has been greatly improved, so everyone wants to buy Huawei products, and mobile phones can also be bought. "
After the mobile phone business was blocked to a certain extent, Huawei smart wearable devices rose. By the end of 2002 1, the cumulative global shipments of Huawei smart wearable devices had exceeded1billion, and in the third quarter of 2002/kloc-0, the shipments of Huawei watches and bracelets ranked first in the world.
Cloud business has also become Huawei's fastest growing business, with 202 1 increasing by about 37%. At present, Huawei has become the second cloud service provider in China and the fifth in the world, second only to Ali in China.
Huawei's ecological development has entered the fast lane, with more than 220 million Huawei devices equipped with HarmonyOS operating system and 65.438+0.5 billion ecological devices shipped.
……
When will Huawei break through the "tight encirclement"?