Earlier this year, the US government put Huawei in a tough spot after adding it to the Entity List. Given that Huawei sources a lot of components for its smartphones as well as networking infrastructure from the US, this was a big blow to the Chinese telecommunications giant. However, according to the comments from Huawei’s President of Global Affairs, Victor Zhang, things were probably not as bad as we thought because of the company’s ‘Business Sustainable Management’ strategy.
In an interview with Xinhuanet in London, Victor revealed that Huawei established a strategy nearly 10 years ago wherein the company has two sources of supply for each component. This along with stockpiling essential components likely should have helped the company sustain the US ban for the past few months. But it’s worth adding that there are some essential components which don’t have an alternative, at least not right now, like Google’s Mobile Services for Android.
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He further revealed that in the context of globalization, components aren’t 100% self-produced. So, it becomes necessary to cooperate with upstream and downstream industry chain to ensure the stability of product supply. He added that Huawei invests more than 10% of its sales revenue every year. There are more than 80,000 people working in R&D in the company right now, which accounts for 45% of the company’s workforce.
While talking about UK’s scene, Victor said that Huawei has invested more than £100 million ($126 million) in the UK, with over 300 engineers working in fields such as AI and 5G. This number is further expected to increase to 400 in 2019. A new R&D center in Cambridge is also in the works.
At present, Huawei has more than 2.500 patents in 5G with a total investment of more than $4 billion.
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(Source)
