Huawei Will Be Able to Break Through Western Powers’ Blockade

 Huawei Will Be Able to Break Through Western Powers’ Blockade

China Times Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

January 26, 2019

 Translation of an Excerpt

The United States has expanded its sanctions against the Mainland’s big tech firms with its latest move targeting Huawei; besides coalescing with the "five-eye intelligence alliance" states in banning Huawei equipment, through Canada, it went further to arrest Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. US attorneys at the same time started justice investigations against the theft of intellectual property rights; Huawei is now facing an extremely difficult external environment. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, in an abrupt change of his low-key style, through media interviews and internal emails, revealed a lot of data of Huawei hitherto unknown to the outside world, and letting the outside world have a peak into of the intricacies of the telecom giant.

Huawei was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei to produce telecommunications equipment such as routers, switches, and base stations. In a short 30 years, it has become the world's biggest producers of base stations and the second biggest manufacturer of smart phones, with a stunning speed. Ten years ago, this company ranked number 3 globally in the mobile equipment market, and was elected by Business Week magazine as one of the top ten most influential enterprises in the world.

Last December, at the extradition request of the United States, Canada arrested Ren Zhengfei’s daughter, also Huawei’s CFO, Mang Wanzhou, who was waiting for a connecting flight in that country, then the situation had a sudden turn for the worse. The media interpreted the move, saying it probably was because Huawei violated US sanctions on exporting equipment to Iran, and covering up with fake accounts. However, more speculations were that the United States wanted to contain Huawei preventing it from becoming a global 5G leader that would overtake the related operators in the US and other Western countries, thus it could not but take this not so smart move.

Huawei's annual R&D expenditures reach as high as US$15 billion to US$20 billion per year. If we take US$17.5 billion as the average value, besides Amazon's US$22.6 billion, last year Huawei surpassed all high-tech corporations. Huawei has at least over 700 mathematicians, over 800 physicists, and over 120 chemists; moreover, it employs over 6,000 basic researchers, over 60,000 engineers, and a total of 180,000 employees, with such super R&D capacity, plus the fact that the firm has not gone public, with shares held by its own employees, prompting them to create about half of the world's 5G patents, becoming the only enterprise that can combine the most advanced microwave technology with 5G base stations, making the cost far below that of Western countries, with quality determined to be far superior to Sweden's Ericsson, Finland's Nokia and South Korea's Samsung. For this reason, in spite of the strong suppression of the United States, Huawei has still been able to obtain 30 5G commercial contracts, supplying 25,000 5G base stations to the international market.

In the future communications market, with Huawei's outstanding R&D capacity, sooner or later, it will be able to break through the market blockade of the US and other principal Western countries, leading the market of communications technologies in the future.

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