Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei: "US sanction is pressure but also motivation"

By Li Panpan

(JW Insights) Oct 11 -- Huawei's founder and chairman Ren Zhengfei has a highly popular image in China as a technology hero. As Huawei came back into the public attention over the last couple of months both in China and overseas, the company released several remarks Ren made in July and August about the impact of the US sanctions on his company and some of Huawei's strategic thinking.

"The US sanctions are indeed pressure on us, but pressure is also motivation" was Ren's widely shared remark. "Before the crackdown, we built the basic platform in the United States. After the US crackdown, we were forced to switch to another platform, which was difficult. After four years of hard work by our 200,000 employees, we have basically established our own platform, " Ren said.

Ren made these remarks to a group of students who participated in the International Collegiate Programming Contest on August 21 and 26.

He added, “In the future, we may not necessarily run on the same basis as the US platform, but there will still be certain interconnections.” Ren was referring to the establishment of Huawei's HarmonyOS after the company was banned from using Google's Android system in May 2019. Huawei also launched EulerOS for enterprise applications.

He added that Huawei's team consists of more than 7,000 foreign scientists and specialists, 13,800 who studied abroad and over 100,000 top local student hires.

Huawei also released in late September the transcripts of another conversation on July 7 with Liu Yadong, dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at Nankai University and former editor-in-chief of Science and Technology Daily. Following are excerpts of more of Ren's remarks:

Huawei's Harmony open source has about 600 million users, ranking third in the world, and facing an increasingly severe international environment, Huawei's development will become more and more difficult, but it will also become more and more prosperous. If China establishes its standard system in the future, this standard system will be better than that of the United States. The American standards were founded in the 1970s, more than 50 years ago.

Today's young people will lead the future era of big data computing power. Within twenty or thirty years, during the artificial intelligence revolution, we will witness the brilliance of young people shining brightly.

The development of the world is inseparable from technological progress and the exchange of talents. Faster speed and better talents are the foundation of national prosperity. Huawei has always adhered to the principles of openness and embracing global talent and is willing to work with academia to cultivate outstanding talents in the information field, but it will never monopolize talents. After these talents train, learn, and grow at Huawei, they will return to their home countries in the future. It will conducive to revitalizing the information industry in various countries.

Huawei is willing to provide internship opportunities to outstanding young people worldwide, helping them get exposed to cutting-edge technologies at Huawei and promoting their growth and development.

The unknown is called science. The boundaries between science and technology are becoming increasingly close in today's world. The time it takes for science to be transformed into technology is getting shorter and shorter. If we wait for universities to fully understand the theory before engaging in technological development, we will lose our first-mover advantage and competitiveness. Therefore, Huawei invests approximately $3-5 billion each year in basic theoretical research, collaborate with universities to jointly explore seemingly useless scientific knowledge.

Huawei is inclusive. We also research why Apple's products are good and see the gap between us and Apple. It's good to have a teacher we can learn from and compare with.