April is the busiest time for Huawei people, and the financial department has to fit the financial data for the new year. Although it is an unlisted company, Huawei publishes its financial results for the past year every year. For CBG (Consumer Business), this month is also supposed to be the launch day of the main flagship model P 50, while in subway stations, shopping malls and streets, it is competitors' models that are grabbing attention and the market, but there is no news about when Huawei will launch the new model.

Huawei employees told Tech Planet that Ren always said, "spend the winter." this winter is really coming.

Huawei had the most difficult winter.

In September 2020, with a special cargo plane flying back from the other side of the Taiwan Strait, Huawei Hayes shipped back Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd's 120 million chips from Taiwan as the last stock of high-precision chips before the ban. The Huawei train, which relies on a huge global supply chain and runs at high speed, can only temporarily stall. Huawei, which once dominated the entire mobile phone terminal, is in fifth place and is only one step away from Others.

Looking at Huawei's results over the past decade, revenue growth was the lowest in 2020, cash and short-term investment were negative for the first time in 10 years, and cash flow from operating activities was the lowest in seven years. Profits fall again after the release of the 2021Q1 financial report.

Tech Planet exclusively learned that Ren Zhengfei said at Huawei's board meeting on April 14, "We give up 'rural' as long as' high-speed rail', ICT and CBG have cut some scenes and products, give up some customers, and the company should shift from technology-oriented to survival-oriented." "

At one end of the balance, the terminal business is declining, and the operator's business is stagnant, which requires a new powerful weight to stop swaying.

Cloud is the first solution given by Huawei, while another tentacle seems to have been found recently, with Huawei Mall selling cars with partner Cyrus, Huawei has finally officially entered the new car. Huawei is now almost a double bet, according to people familiar with the matter to Tech. Huawei Cloud and Auto are the two star BU within Huawei and help Huawei breed new hope in difficult times.

More than 3000 cars are scheduled in 2 days, which is still in the case of only one car, this figure exceeds the monthly sales of partners in the past, and will soon catch up with and surpass the ideal data of the "three heroes of new cars" NIO Inc., XPeng Inc. and so on.

Huawei does not build cars, but rushes into the tide of new cars as a challenger, becoming a force that can not be ignored. Automobile has gradually become an important dependence of Huawei in its thirties.

Rub your hands and drive to a new car

At the annual strategy meeting held in coconut sea breeze in Sanya in 2018, Huawei executives made a major decision: Huawei does not build cars, but helps car companies build good cars.

The following year, Huawei officially launched the smart car solution BU, and a year later, it planned the smart car solution BU into the consumer business, which is equivalent to raising the internal level of the smart car business as a whole. Because internally, consumer BG, Huawei's crown BG, has been the largest source of revenue since 2018, belonging to consumer BG, meaning a significant tilt in access to resources.

Recently, Tech Planet learned exclusively about the BU architecture of Huawei's smart car solution, which is different from that of Huawei when it was first announced after June 2020. After readjusting, the entire automotive business structure has been basically established, and some responsible persons have come to take up their duties.

Huawei smart car solution BU consists of nine departments, including Architecture Design and Integration Strategy Department, Strategic Business Development Department, Policy and Standards Patent Department and Marketing Department, which can be regarded as the foreground department; MDC Product Department is equivalent to Zhongtai, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit and intelligent car cloud will become the three main product lines of Huawei; quality and Operations Department is the back-end department.

At the management level, except Li Zhensheng, head of MDC products Department, and Zheng Gang, Minister of Strategic Business Development, all ministers are internal members of BUAT, which is similar to EMT, Huawei's top decision-making body, and has more decision-making power. the chairman of EMT rotates every 6 months to participate in Huawei's top strategy, while BUAT will participate in the strategic decision-making and development of the entire smart car solution BU.

Tech Planet also learned that from the perspective of the whole BU, the rank of department heads, that is, ministers, within Huawei is all star. In Huawei's rating structure, stars mean more than 22 levels and are important senior managers. Wang Jun, president of smart car BU, for example, used to be the head of Huawei's Japanese operator business and has been at Huawei for more than 20 years. Others such as CTO Cai Jianyong are also Chinese and have rich self-driving experience.

Recently, Huawei has appointed Li Rengui, president of European consumer business, to succeed Wang Yanyi as president of Huawei's global ecological development department, according to Tencent News "first Line". Wang Yanyi will be in charge of the newly established ecological special project optimization team, which will be responsible for automobile-related business, aiming at Huawei's smart selection of new car categories. The deployment of such troops also shows that Huawei attaches great importance to the new car business.

At present, the scale of the whole smart car solution BU is about 1000 people, in addition, because a large number of people will be distributed in different departments, such as HiCar, autopilot chips and so on, they do not belong to BU. As a result, Huawei will have a larger team related to the car manufacturing business.

Tech Planet notes that the profile of a Huawei autopilot executive reads, "urgent recruitment, a lot of hiring." "according to internal information, the formation of a team of 5-6,000 people will be the final size.

The new car-building business once again shows Huawei's focus on business, which is also the pressure principle mentioned by Ren Zhengfei many times. Huawei basic Law also said: "We adhere to the pressure principle, on the key factors of success and selected strategic points." to exceed the intensity of major competitors to allocate resources, or do not do, to do it will greatly concentrate human, material and financial resources to achieve key breakthroughs. "

Although it has previously said that it does not build cars, Huawei is devoting all its efforts to the entire auto business.

The days of internal and external troubles

"it is difficult and difficult to get along with each other. The autumn wind sends cold apricot leaves yellow. "this is Ren Zhengfei's moving farewell speech at the honorable farewell party in November 2020.

Stripping Honor and surviving with a broken arm is the best choice Huawei can do during the injunction period. the 10 billion yuan deposit for the sale of Glory has been paid by the end of 2020, and the rest will be paid by the end of June 2021. At that time, the glory will disappear completely in Huawei's data.

There is a saying within Huawei that it is called "Holy end God Wireless". Looking through Huawei's financial results over the past decade, we can see that the three major BG of Huawei operators, enterprises and consumers supported Huawei's ship to sail farther away, but under the influence of the ban, these three major businesses have no magical aura and are all in decline.

In 2020, Huawei achieved annual sales revenue of 891.4 billion yuan, a slight increase of 3.8%, and net profit of 64.6 billion yuan, an increase of 3.2% over the same period last year. It is worth noting that in the past five years, Huawei's income and net profit have grown at a compound annual growth rate of 14.3% and 14.9%, respectively, compared with the lowest growth rate in 2020; the first negative growth in cash and short-term investment in 10 years; and the lowest cash flow from operating activities in seven years. The slight increase in revenue and profits is actually a retrogression for Huawei, which has always been brave.

Huawei's theme for 2020 is struggling to survive.

Taking the individual business layer as an example, Huawei's mobile terminal business has almost failed due to the influence of chips. Huawei's consumer business maintained a high growth rate of 34.0% in 2019, but in 2020, the consumer business grew by only 3.3%, the lowest in all years. This is still the result of the year-on-year growth of PC, tablet, smart wear, smart screen and other businesses as high as 15.4%. Therefore, Huawei did not make a separate announcement of mobile phone shipments this year, and we can deduce how bleak it is without announcing it.

According to 2019 data, Huawei shipped more than 240 million mobile phones, which means that the 120 million chips stored should not only meet the needs of the second half of 2020, but also continue to be supplied in 2021. As a result, terminal shipments are expected to be lower in 2021.

As for the operator business, the revenue was 296.7 billion yuan, an increase of only 0.2%. In other words, the communications equipment business that let Huawei once stand still, looking through Huawei's financial results over the years, Huawei's operator business has entered a low growth and embarrassing stage since 2017. the year-on-year growth rate hovered between-4.03% and 3.8%, and the upward resistance is very obvious.

In this way, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, said at a global financial business mobilization meeting within Huawei in March that "the cloud is the future. Huawei can't always do business around operators, so it will die."

On the other hand, the cloud business, which is highly expected, is also under short-term pressure and confusion. In 2017, Huawei established a "Cloud Business Unit" (Cloud BU), which is the first time that Huawei has defined a project with BU. In August of the same year, Cloud BU was upgraded from a second-level department to a first-level department, second only to the three major BG. The following year, Cloud BU was reorganized into "Cloud&AI products and Services" with the goal of building Huawei's new engine in computing and cloud business.

In 2020, Huawei's cloud business changed again, establishing Cloud & AI BG, and Huawei Cloud's status was upgraded to become the fourth largest BG. In order to ensure the development of cloud business, Yu Chengdong was transferred to serve as president of Cloud & AI BG at the beginning of 2021. However, less than three months later, "Cloud & AI BG" was abolished and changed back to "Cloud BU". At the same time, Xu Zhijun was appointed chairman of cloud and Yu Chengdong was appointed Huawei cloud CEO.

Constantly adjusting and changing the architecture highlights the awkward position of the cloud business, while the four-year-old cloud computing has never appeared in the financial report, which seems to suggest that losses are likely to be the status quo of the cloud business.

In 2003, Huawei set up a mobile phone business unit with the aim of making white-brand phones for operators. According to Ren Zhengfei, Huawei's terminal business was forced to launch, and now teaming up with car companies to build a new "car-building" business model for HUAWEI inside seems to be another major choice Huawei has no choice but to make in a difficult situation.

Be Microsoft Corp in the era of smart cars?

2km from Huawei Shanghai Research Institute, Manka Science Park, 901 Tanglu Road, Pudong, Shanghai, there is a site similar to a basketball court. This used to be the parking lot of Volkswagen, has been transformed into a small testing ground, with the loud roar of a modified Tesla Model X, it has become the starting point of Huawei's car dream.

The modified battery-powered electric locomotive came from Huawei's vehicle networking Business Department, headed by Cai Jianyong, who is also the CTO of the current car BU. The car networking business unit was born in Huawei's mysterious "2012 Lab". Huawei has been developing vehicle modules since 2009; in 2013, it set up the vehicle networking business department and launched the vehicle module ME909T, which began to lay out the car networking field.

When Huawei started to build cars, there was no concept of intelligent driving at that time, and slowly, the focus of research shifted from electric technology to self-driving.

With regard to self-driving, there has also been controversy within Huawei. According to internal information, in 2018, Ren Zhengfei said: "self-driving we cannot dominate the world, we must have the data to dominate the world, we have no advantage. I think we can focus on the car network. Maybe we can still dominate. Using the Internet of cars to achieve self-driving is a matter for other companies. "

Recently, the self-driving muscles have been frequently shown in the cooperative car, and we know that the direction has been reversed.

Huawei joined the new car, not only because of the current situation, but also a big net that has been laid out for nearly 9 years, and finally ushered in the closing time in 2021. Maybe it's too early to talk about closing the net, but the car-building thing is not a pat on the head. In a broader dimension, Huawei can only build a complete ecosystem by building cars.

Huawei won the first-class surveying and mapping qualification for navigation electronic map production in July 2019. In 2021, Huawei high-precision maps will be launched for commercial use. At that time, data will be covered in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Tianjin and Chongqing. With the help of high-precision maps, autopilot accuracy will be enhanced.

In addition, there are more than 5000 experience stores and 730 million smartphone users across the country, which can provide a huge traffic entrance for product sales.

Huawei's ambition is not to become the tier1 of the smart car era, but also to make the software and hardware integrated. In addition, the operating system built by Huawei itself is not only Tier1, but also Tier0 (operating system). Finally, Huawei will take itself as the center, accept a wide circle of friends, create a complete ecology, and finally become the Microsoft Corp of the smart car era.

The operating system is the ultimate business competition, the pc era is Microsoft Corp, the mobile era is Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc-CL C control the absolute dominance of smartphones and the vast majority of profits, and in the era of smart cars, driverless operating systems may appear "four kingdoms"-Huawei, Tesla, Inc., Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc-CL C.

The business of smart cars will not only link most of Huawei's existing businesses, but also become an important part of Huawei's future business landscape. Yu Chengdong, Huawei's consumer business, said, "there are millions of applications for mobile phones, ten thousand for PC, thousands for televisions and only one hundred for cars. Through Huawei HiCar, millions of apps from mobile phones can be brought to cars. "this is Huawei's ultimate ambition.

Tech Planet learned through former BU employees who had participated in the extreme Fox project, "during the cooperation, Huawei's ecology was not well applied, and traditional car companies were wary of Huawei, which led to many of Huawei's advantages not being brought into full play. "

At present, only Changan, Xiaokang and BAIC can hand over the back, but the voice volume of these three in the whole new energy industry is still too low. Whether we can call on more partners to join this circle of friends has become a new problem for Huawei. After all, some people play, is the party, no one comes, can only dance solo.