China Unicom Beijing will commercial Huawei’s 64T64R MetaAAU product in a pilot urban residential area in Tongzhou District. China Unicom says the rollout of 64T64R MetaAAU resulted in a significant increase in user-perceived rates. Even at a building near the cell edge, the downlink user-perceived rate was able to reach 100 Mbps on every floor, China Unicom added.

64T64R MetaAAU is an upgrade of the Huawei MetaAAU series that adopts extremely large antenna array (ELAA) technology. The number of channels has grown from 32T32R to 64T64R, meaning this new green 5G base station Massive MIMO product can deliver upgrade coverage and capacity.

References:

https://www.telecompaper.com/news/china-unicom-huawei-to-commercialize-64t64r-metaaau-for-5g-subscribers-in-residential-areas–1434471

https://www.telecompaper.com/news/china-unicom-deploys-1000-metaaaus-with-huawei–1430843

Huawei Technologies said on Wednesday it will step up efforts to expand its presence in the commercial hardware market in its latest effort to pursue new growth opportunities beyond smartphones amid foreign government restrictions.  Richard Yu Chengdong, a member of Huawei‘s executive board, said: “The company has rebranded its consumer business group that includes smartphones, PCs and other consumer-oriented businesses, into a device business group, to showcase its determination to tap into enterprise-oriented businesses such as PCs used in offices, desktops and large displays for industry customers.”

Huawei‘s new group will focus on providing office hardware and software solutions for key sectors including education, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, finance and energy, Huawei said.  Huawei‘s consumer business group used to contribute the most to the overall revenue of the company. But due to tough US government restrictions on Huawei‘s access to crucial technologies including semiconductors, the company’s smartphone sales plunged.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, Huawei‘s consumer business group revenue dropped nearly 50 percent to 243.4 billion yuan ($38 billion).

According to market research company Counterpoint, the company’s global smartphone market share fell below 4 percent since the first quarter of 2021, compared with its peak of 20 percent in the second quarter of 2020.

Amid such a context, Huawei has been working hard to find new growth engines to offset its declining smartphone business.

At an online product launch on Wednesday, Huawei unveiled its latest commercial tablets, smart wearables and displays equipped with its self-developed HarmonyOS. Huawei also provides a customized full-scenario payment solution called Huawei Payment for government clients and small and medium-sized enterprises.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Information Consumption Alliance, an industry association, said sales channels constitute the biggest difference between consumer-oriented and enterprise-oriented businesses. The former relies on retail stores, while the latter depends on close partnerships with customers from industries.

Exhibition area of Huawei during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, on March 1, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

Huawei‘s advantages in product performance, quality as well as research and development can still give it an edge in enterprise-oriented business, Xiang said, adding that Huawei has accumulated experience in targeting industrial customers in its 5G base station business.  Huawei is also continuing its drive for development of the OpenEuler operating system as part of its broader push to solve China’s lack of homegrown operating systems for fundamental digital technologies.

OpenEuler is designed for enterprise customers and can be used in devices such as servers and cloud computing. Last year, Huawei donated its Euler operating system to the OpenAtom Foundation, a major open source foundation in China, to become an open-source OS.

Jiang Dayong, director of the OpenEuler Community, said the OpenEuler open source community has attracted more than 8,000 developers and 330 partners such as chip makers, software companies and hardware makers. At present, the cumulative installed capacity of OpenEuler stands at more than 1.3 million in industries such as finance, transportation and telecom, which means the system is ready for faster growth.  Jiang said he expects about 2 million new installations of OpenEuler in 2022.

Computer products at a Huawei store in Foshan, Guangdong province, on April 4, 2022. Photo: VCG

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References:

https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202204/21/WS6260b1a9a310fd2b29e58410.html#:~:text=Huawei%20Technologies%20Co%20said%20on,smartphones

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2022-04-21/huawei-targets-corporate-clients-as-consumer-business-suffers-101874112.html  (Paywall)

Condensed and edited Financial Times article by Kathrin Hille in Taipei, Eleanor Olcott in London and James Kynge in Hong Kong

In the first half of this year, revenues at Huawei fell by almost 30 per cent compared with the same period last year, the largest ever drop.  As U.S. restrictions have begun to derail Huawei’s traditional business, the group is now in a scramble to try to reinvent itself. The company is turning away from the development and sale of telecommunications network gear and smartphones into areas less dependent on foreign chip supplies — such as cloud services and software for smart cars. Huawei is also doubling down on its own research and development in an effort to escape the stranglehold of American sanctions. It is investing heavily to be a leader in the emerging 6G technology so that other companies are dependent on its patents — rather than Huawei relying on technology imports from the US. “In the current climate, the best way to describe the atmosphere within Huawei and the way we go about things, is like a huge collection of start-ups,” says Henk Koopmans, the company’s head of research and development in the UK.

At stake is not just the fate of one of China’s most prominent and successful companies, but the broader technological competition between Beijing and Washington. Chinese officials are clear that Huawei has been a vital part of the country’s network of innovation.

“Many have viewed Huawei as the only possibility for China to make a breakthrough in semiconductors and telecoms,” says a local government official in Shenzhen, the technology industry hub in southern China that is Huawei’s home. “So Huawei must survive. It is a national mission.”

The company’s smartphone sales dropped by more than 47 per cent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year. Last week, rotating chairman Eric Xu predicted that in the full year, the company will lose up to $40bn of its $50bn smartphone business, a slide that analysts estimate will drive the share of the consumer business in Huawei’s total revenues from 42 per cent earlier this year to just over 30 per cent. “Huawei’s component bottlenecks are now starting to bite,” says Ben Stanton, a smartphone analyst at market research group Canalys. “Stockpiles are running low, and its volume will almost certainly continue to fall each quarter.” Noting that Huawei’s smartphone arm has retreated to its Chinese home market, he adds that its strength in previous overseas strongholds such as Europe “has completely evaporated.”

In the network equipment business, the decline is happening more slowly, partly because product cycles are longer.  Although Huawei can no longer procure custom application-specific chips for its telecom products, it was assuring analysts that it had enough inventory to keep the infrastructure business running in the near term. In response to these losses, the first big push has been to strengthen Huawei’s software capabilities so that it is less dependent on producing hardware that it will struggle more and more to deliver without access to chip supplies.

The main software-driven business Huawei is rushing to build is cloud services. Some of the functions in a telecoms network traditionally performed by base stations can be transferred to software processes in the cloud with newer technology. Moreover, Huawei is rapidly developing new cloud services, which it offers to companies and government departments. Last week, the company announced plans to invest $100m in the next three years for small and medium-sized businesses to develop on Huawei Cloud.  The company’s cloud business grew by 116% in the first quarter of this year to take a 20% share of the Chinese market (second only to Alibaba Cloud).

According to Canalys, Huawei’s cloud business grew by 116 per cent in the first quarter of this year to take a 20 per cent share of a $6bn market in China, behind Alibaba Cloud but ahead of Tencent. “Huawei Cloud’s results have been boosted by internet customers and government projects, as well as key wins in the automotive sector. It is a growing part of Huawei’s overall business,” says Matthew Ball, chief analyst at Canalys. He says that while about 90 per cent of this business is in China, Huawei Cloud has a stronger presence in Latin America and Europe, Middle East and Africa compared with Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud. There are limits on Huawei’s cloud business, however.

In July, Chinese media reported that the company was considering selling a part of its server business that runs on x86 central processing units after Intel’s export license for providing Huawei with that component expired. Servers are indispensable for cloud companies because they are where the hardware data is stored and much of the computing needed for cloud services is performed. Huawei and Intel both declined to comment, but industry experts say processor supplies are a headache for Huawei.

“Selling the server business is highly likely,” says Ben Sheen, semiconductor research director for network and communication infrastructure at research firm IDC. “The CPU is a central component, and if Intel cannot ship, Huawei is in big trouble.” As in the network gear business, providers of cloud services such as Amazon Web Services or Google try to boost performance by improving their software. If Huawei can achieve the same, it will be in less urgent need to get new processor supplies. “In smartphones, your revenue share goes down very quickly if you don’t have the latest chips. In cloud, you can keep running a decent business for much longer, and maybe even expand your revenue if you invest in software differentiation,” says Jue Wang, an associate partner in the technology practice of Bain, a consulting company.

Although companies such as Intel and AMD release new CPUs every year, the majority of cloud service providers’ servers run on processors two to five years old. The cloud companies increasingly generate new revenues by investing in new AI services and tools — even if their servers run on older chips.  “But eventually you will need new ones — you cannot offer cloud services without CPUs,” Wang says.

One of the fields where Huawei finds it relatively easy to pick up new business is helping to digitize industries that have been laggards in the adoption of information technology. It is offering telecom, IT and software tools to Chinese companies in sectors such as coal mining and port operations, enabling them to lower costs and enhance security. Driven by these operations, Huawei’s enterprise business revenues grew by 23 per cent last year and 18 per cent in the first half of this year.

“The enterprise business will likely continue to be a growth point for Huawei,” says Ethan Qi, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, who forecasts revenues in that segment to increase by up to 15 per cent a year in the next few years. Still, Huawei frets that this is not enough to offset the death blow the US sanctions are dealing to the smartphone business. The new industry verticals “may not even be able to compensate for those lost revenues in 10 years,” Huawei rotating Chairman Xu told reporters last week.

Huawei is making some striking bets on new areas. One of the biggest is in electric and autonomous vehicles (EV’s). Huawei made its first R&D foray into vehicles in 2014, but now the company is drastically cranking up commitment, with plans to form a 5,000-strong R&D team and investment of $1bn in the segment this year. The company says it will not build cars itself, but its engineers are clearly looking into everything short of that. “Initially, we just thought we would help the car connect, but after a while we realized that we can also help make it more intelligent,” says a Huawei official.

A vehicle released by Chinese automaker Beiqi at the Shanghai Auto Show this year featured an entire in-car electronics solution developed by Huawei. For this shift, the company is harnessing strengths built over years in its telecoms hardware business — executives say experience in designing base stations that can withstand extreme weather conditions comes in handy because temperature controls are a key requirement in electric vehicles. “They have refocused their teams in the research centers they run in Europe: In the past, those were 3G and 4G-facing, and now they are focused on [advanced driver-assistance systems],” says Jean-Christophe Eloy, chief executive and president of Yole, a French technology research and consultancy firm.

A large portion of the chips required in automotive electronics are manufactured with more mature processing technology, which does not need to be imported. “Much of that technology is available in China,” Eloy says. “Focusing on automotive therefore can also help them get away from their chip supply problem.”

But Huawei has its sights set far beyond keeping the business running in the near term: If anything, its ambition to be a tech pioneer has grown even stronger. Ren Zhengfei, founder and chief executive and Meng’s father, is letting some of Huawei’s researchers off the leash to focus on basic science and explore technology breakthroughs even without a clear understanding of its potential business applications.

“We will not demand you to put down your quill and join the troops,” Ren told R&D staff at a meeting in August. He added that the research team at HiSilicon, Huawei’s chip design unit, would be kept even though the US sanctions have robbed the Shenzhen-based operation of the chance to manufacture its advanced chips. “We allow HiSilicon to continue to scale the Himalayas,” Ren said. “The majority of us others will stay down here to grow potatoes, herd livestock and keep sending provisions to the climbers, because you can’t grow rice on Mount Everest,” Ren added.

Last year, Huawei invested Rmb141.9bn ($22bn) in R&D, almost 16 per cent of its revenue. The driver behind this focus on high-end research is the urge to become less dependent on foreign technology — while also laying the groundwork for growing intellectual property royalties.

In 5G, Huawei is one of the most significant owners of patents, forcing rival network gear makers such as Ericsson or Nokia to make certain payments to Huawei even if the Chinese company is excluded from 5G contracts in many western countries. Exhorting research staff to seek global technology leadership at the August meeting, Ren said: “We research 6G as a precaution, to seize the patent front, to make sure that when 6G one day really comes into use, we will not depend on others.” Elaborating on the potential uses of 6G for the first time, Ren said the technology might, beyond telecom’s traditional realm of connectivity, be used for sensing and detection — functions with potential for use from healthcare to surveillance. That expectation has grown out of the results of the “collection of start-ups” approach touted by Huawei’s UK research director Henk Koopmans. Ren’s encouragement for Huawei to pursue basic science is instilling what he hopes will be a start-up mentality in many of the company’s own R&D staff.

In addition, it is also tapping into a growing number of start-ups in which it invested in recent years. Engineers at the Centre for Integrated Photonics, a start-up based in Ipswich, eastern England, which Huawei acquired in 2012, recently developed a laser on a chip that can direct light into a fiber-optic cable — an alternative to established telecoms technology that sends pulses of infrared light through the cable. The researchers built the chip themselves, using Indium Phosphide technology instead of mainstream silicon-based semiconductors where US-owned tool technology gives Washington a stranglehold and which Huawei is struggling to obtain.

A circuit board on display at Huawei’s HQ.  Image Credit: Bloomberg

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Koopmans says one future use of the technology could be transferring data from sensors on the skin measuring blood oxygen content in remote healthcare services. “And all this photonics activity came from a really research background where we never knew if a product would ever see the light of day. But this is how we are doing things now — reutilize our R&D capabilities in a non-monolithic way.” Ren is not short on ambition for the group’s R&D operations, but acknowledges that they might not provide short-term results.

“Some theories and papers may not be put to use until one or two hundred years after they were first published,” he told R&D staff, reminding them that the significance of Gregor Mendel’s genetics discoveries was not understood until decades later. “Your paper may even have a fate like van Gogh’s paintings — nobody showed interest in them for more than 100 years, but now they are priceless.  Van Gogh starved.”

Additional reporting by Nian Liu in Beijing and Qianer Liu in Shenzhen

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References:

https://www.ft.com/content/9e98a0db-8d0a-4f78-90d3-25bfebcf3ac9

Huawei announces seven innovations in digital infrastructure for next decade

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3150716/huawei-hires-former-bbc-executive-editor-chief-push-hire-more-foreign

On Friday at HUAWEI CONNECT 2021, Huawei unveiled “breakthrough” innovations in several different domains, providing a first look at its comprehensive digital infrastructure range. Several of these innovations are completely new and have never been seen before outside of Huawei’s labs. The release highlighted how these products and solutions are set to shape digital infrastructure for the next decade. Huawei is one of the world’s leading creators of digital infrastructure, and is dedicated to building a fully connected, intelligent world.

During the event, Huawei Executive Director and President of ICT Products & Solutions David Wang delivered a keynote speech titled Leading Innovation in Digital Infrastructure. In the speech, he noted, “Infrastructure has been vital to every stage of human development. The intelligent world is fast approaching and digital infrastructure is the key to building this intelligent world. The world now faces unprecedented challenges and so Huawei will remain customer-centric and committed to innovation. We are dedicated to breakthroughs to serve major application scenarios such as digital offices, smart manufacturing, wide area network (WAN), and data centers, and accelerate the development of the global digital infrastructure.”

Wang explained how digital infrastructure of the future would need to be hyper secure, reliable, and deterministic, and need more efficient data circulation and computing power as the world dives into digital. This speech started with the ideas Wang introduced two days ago at the release event for Huawei’s Intelligent World 2030 report. The report itself finds that, by 2030, global connections will top 200 billion; monthly data per cellular user will grow 40 times to 600 gigabytes; worldwide general computing volume will grow 10 times over; and data generated will increase by 23 times, reaching one yottabyte for the first time. All of this creates a picture of new challenges and opportunities for the digital infrastructure sector over the next 10 years.

The main focus of his speech were seven specific innovations Huawei has launched or is about to launch onto the market.

1.  Digital meeting rooms: Powered by intelligent “Office Twins” and bridging the world with ubiquitous gigabit and seamless collaboration

The newest “Office Twins” from Huawei are the AirEngine 6761 and IdeaHub. AirEngine 6761 are the industry’s highest-performance Wi-Fi 6E product that delivers an experience-centric, all-wireless network for businesses, with instant and secure user access, interaction latency down to 10 milliseconds, and ultra-fast file transfer at 1,000 Mbps. As part of the next generation of smart office tools, the 6-in-1 design of IdeaHub allows it to function as a projector, whiteboard, computer, conference endpoint, speaker, and microphone, enabling “frictionless collaboration” across different locations.

2. Huawei OptiXsense: Accelerating pipeline inspection

The Huawei OptiXsense EF3000 is the company’s first product under the OpiXsense family, and is currently the most accurate optical sensor of the industry. Coming packed with Huawei’s leading optical technologies, the OptiXsense uses a unique optical digital signal processor (oDSP) and a new vibration ripple analysis engine for automatic incident identification. The OptiXsense achieves 97% accuracy, compared with the industry average of 60%–80%. It is designed to streamline oil and gas pipeline inspections, and will ultimately enable intelligent, unmanned pipeline inspections. Going forward, OptiXsense products will also support other domains, monitoring temperature, stress, and water quality.

3. The industry’s first deterministic IP network solution: Making lights-out digital factories a reality

Industrial control systems demand extremely low levels of network latency and jitter. Conventional IP networks cannot deliver these standards, but today Huawei unveiled the industry’s first deterministic IP network solution, providing end-to-end guaranteed network performance to support industrial controls. This solution uses CloudEngine S6730-H-V2 switches and NetEngine 8000 M8 routers. Huawei’s innovations in IP system engineering and algorithms deliver microsecond-level single-hop latency and keep jitter within 30 microseconds from end to end, regardless of the number of hops. The solution supports multi-hop networking of tens of thousands of nodes, so it can deliver deterministic IP network performance for a workshop, a factory, or even multiple factories. It can even support centralized remote control of production lines located thousands of kilometers away.

4. H-OTN: Leading a revolution in secure production networks

H-OTN, the industry’s first converged optical device that supports hard pipe technologies, introduces an innovative Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP) OTN architecture for access networks. For the first time, Huawei enables an end-to-end hard pipe, from the access network to WAN, using a redefined product architecture and converged protocols. This not only guarantees 100% security, but also reduces latency by at least 60%. Huawei H-OTN will provide highly reliable communications networks, with ultra-low latency and simplified O&M, to support digital transformation across industries such as electric power and transportation.

5. An industry-leading IP network solution: Enabling cross-region computing resource scheduling

Huawei’s newest IP network solution delivers industry-leading performance to help customers build vast, unified networks for cross-region computing. This solution combines Huawei’s CloudEngine 16800 data center switches and NetEngine 8000 F8 WAN routers. Thanks to intelligent & lossless algorithm 2.0 and intelligent cloud graph algorithm, this Huawei solution is able to construct ultra-large data center networks connecting up to 270,000 servers, three times larger than the industry average. It guarantees 0 packet loss on Ethernet and lowers latency by 25%. This solution also features intelligent routing by cloud service type and cloud-network resource factor, improving transmission efficiency by 30%.

6. OceanStor Pacific: Ushering in an era of High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA)

OceanStor Pacific is the industry’s first distributed storage for HPDA, representing huge breakthroughs in technical architecture, including data flows adaptive to large and small I/O, converged indexing for unstructured data, ultra-high-density hardware, and EC algorithms. With this solution, a single storage unit can make data analytics 30% more efficient by supporting hybrid workloads across high-performance computing (HPC), big data analytics, and AI computing, breaking through the performance, protocol, and capacity barriers that typically limit HPDA. OceanStor Pacific has already been deployed in oilfields, and is set to accelerate the digital transformation of oil and gas exploration and create digital basins and oilfields.

7. Huawei CC Solution: Building the industry’s first public diversified computing service platform

Huawei’s CC Solution helps customers roll out public platforms that provide diversified computing power. It is designed with three scenarios in mind: AI computing centers, high performance computing centers, and integrated big data centers. The solution has four advantages over traditional solutions: diversified computing, rapid rollout, efficient utilization, and on-demand service. This solution is already in use in multiple projects, powering industry clusters with computing clusters and supporting the digital transformation of countless industries.

As Wang closed out the day’s events, he stressed that the future of digital infrastructure will need a thriving software ecosystem in addition to new and innovative hardware. He promised that Huawei continues its “dive into digital” and will continue working with partners, developers, and open source organizations from around the world to build a diverse software ecosystem that is shared and open.

Wang concluded by saying, “Each and every R&D employee at Huawei lives and breathes innovation. No matter what comes our way, innovation will remain constant. To sum up, our innovation in digital infrastructure centers on: breakthroughs in basic theories and algorithms; technology spillover; technical architecture; product architecture; industry pace; industry direction; and industry creation… Huawei will remain committed to innovation in digital infrastructure, create value for customers and partners on an ongoing basis, and work relentlessly to build a fully connected, intelligent world.”

Huawei hosts HUAWEI CONNECT 2021 online from September 23 to October 31. The theme of this year’s event is Dive into Digital. We’re going to dive deep into the practical application of technologies like cloud, AI, and 5G in all industries, and how they can make organizations of all shapes and sizes more efficient, more versatile, and ultimately more resilient as we move towards economic recovery.

References:

https://www.huawei.com/us/news/2021/9/huawei-connect-2021-david-wang-seven-innovations

https://www.huawei.com/en/events/huaweiconnect