However, Yu Chengdong's appointment as the head of Huawei's cloud business also reflects Huawei's internal emphasis on cloud computing business. In addition, the smart car solution BU was previously adjusted from ICT (information and communication technology) to a consumer business group. So far, Yu Chengdong has coordinated Huawei's mobile phones (smart mobile terminals), automobiles (smart in-vehicle systems), and cloud computing (Cloud &; AI) Three core businesses.
"Where Yu Chengdong goes, it will become a star and the main product line", an old employee of Huawei Cloud told Science and Technology Planet (WeChat ID: ID:tech6 18). It seems that Huawei's intention is to make Yu Chengdong, which can win the battle, switch from the C-side to the B-side business, not only to compete with Apple in the fields of mobile phones, tablets and computers, but also to compete with Internet giants such as Microsoft in the fields of cloud computing and AI.
However, at present, both business prospects are facing challenges. The problem of "lack of core" makes Huawei's high-end flagship machine Mate 40 seriously out of stock, and it is still unknown whether the next generation flagship machine Mate 50 can continue. The burning property of cloud computing business also made Ren issue an internal document saying: "Don't learn from Ali and Amazon, they have inexhaustible money in the stock market."
It is already the first mobile phone business in the world and the sixth in the global market share. The development story is not as smooth as expected. In the future development prospect of Huawei, can it eventually become Apple+Microsoft?
On June 28th, 65438, Apple, Huawei's old rival, released the Q 1 financial report of 202 1 (equivalent to Q4 in fiscal year 2020). Apple's overall revenue this quarter reached11/4.39 million US dollars, up 2 1% year-on-year, setting a new high for single-season revenue; The net profit was $28.755 billion, a year-on-year increase of 29%.
Apple's financial report is so bright, the core reason is that its first 5G mobile phone iPhone 12 is sold out. Yu Chengdong once told the media that "our 5G mobile phone is the third generation, and other competitors (Apple) are the first generation". But the first generation is not important, because the chip supply is insufficient, Huawei Mate 40 is very out of stock now. The price of this mobile phone has been fried to 8000 yuan in many channels, and it is still hard to find a machine.
Looking back, Huawei's mobile phone business began in 2003, with PHS as the earliest and channel phone later. At that time, Huawei's wireless business was so small that it was almost stopped. After 20 12 took over Huawei's consumer business, Yu Chengdong made an important decision to save the mobile phone business. "Instead of making low-end brand mobile phones, it is better to make high-end products and promote Huawei's own brands. It was a bold decision at that time, "Yu Chengdong once said in the documentary" Who is Huawei ".
Since then, Huawei's P 10 mobile phone has become famous with its beautiful design. Mate's decision to position itself as a high-end business has also won market recognition. The e-commerce of the glory series and the main sinking game have also consolidated the foundation of Huawei's consumer business. In 20 19, Huawei's mobile phone shipments also developed from insignificant to surpassing Apple.
Under the strategic decision of making high-end brands, Huawei has made efforts in three aspects: chips, systems and ecological partners. The Kirin chip of Huawei Hisilicon was forcibly applied to Huawei's mobile phone, which experienced a pit in K3V2 and continued to evolve to Kirin 9 10/0,960,980,990,9000. Now Kirin's self-developed chip has become the golden signboard of Huawei's mobile phone.
Huawei's next-generation HarmonyOS system has also entered the 2.0 test version stage. Tech Planet experienced HarmonyOS system and found that its main feature is that it is compatible with Android system and application programs, and it is oriented to the Internet of Things era. The R&D staff of HarmonyOS System demonstrated the multi-screen interactive gameplay in the fields of education, fitness and games. Although HarmonyOS's system is not as closed as Apple's iOS, there is still a lot of commercial space for Huawei to serve the scenes of Internet of Things in work and life.
In the field of creating ecology, even when the chip prospect is not bright at the end of 2020, Huawei still held the mobile phone eco-partner conference. Wang Yanming, president of Huawei's Global Ecological Development Department, who is in charge of Huawei's mobile service ecosystem (HMS), promised thousands of ecological partners that Huawei would not give up the pace of ecological construction and development. However, according to Tech Planet observation, from the optimistic prospect of overseas markets collected on the spot, it has become a trend to retreat from the United States and Europe to Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.
It should be said that if Huawei is given another two years, SMIC can break through the problem of chip production in a smaller process and successfully produce high-end chips such as 5NM of Huawei Hisilicon chips; The official commercial version of HarmonyOS System will also be officially released, and Huawei EMUI's ecological partners will be more mature, thus replacing Google's GMS with HMS in Europe and America.
Unfortunately, time waits for no one. Huawei was caught by the throat of fate at the critical moment when it was about to be able to fully wrestle with Apple.
The four cores of cloud computing are computing, communication, storage and security. It can be said that Huawei has top advantages in these fields, so it is logical to enter the field of cloud computing.
However, from the perspective of Huawei's internal strategy, doing cloud computing and AI business too early is in conflict with the revenue of selling its own hardware+system solutions such as servers. Huawei Cloud &; The problem of internal friction between artificial intelligence and EBG service has been difficult to solve. Therefore, it was not until 20 17 that Huawei Cloud brand was officially released, and then by 2020, Huawei Cloud became the "black land" for global enterprises, helping ecological enterprises to grow potatoes, peanuts and so on.
Today's revenue makes way for tomorrow's development, and the strategic position of Huawei Cloud will be clarified.
However, according to the data of Konas, Huawei Cloud has ranked second in the domestic public cloud market with a share of 15.5%. However, in Huawei's intranet voice community, there are still employees who describe "the past three years are the three years lost by Huawei Cloud."
According to the insiders, it is easy for Huawei to surpass Baidu Cloud and Jinshan Cloud, but it is not difficult to surpass Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud. Huawei itself lacks online services such as e-commerce, video and games, and its own business does not involve cloud computing applications and data. It has the problem that "a clever woman can't cook without rice", but it has to go to the market to compete for customers in various industries and compete with domestic and foreign giants who started and developed earlier. Huawei Cloud & AI BG's ability to organize wars is also in doubt.
Huawei Cloud has experienced three directors. The first is Xu Zhijun, the current rotating chairman of Huawei, who led the birth and positioning of Huawei Cloud during his tenure as rotating CEO. As Xu Zhijun has always been at the core of Huawei's power pyramid, Huawei Cloud can be upgraded from BU to BG, and become four first-class business groups in parallel with the consumer business group led by Yu Chengdong.
Some Huawei cloud employees commented: "Xu is good at high technology, and his personal positioning is to push some new technologies across the times." For example, the glory of AI mobile phone magic, Xu Zhijun is behind the scenes. Because cloud computing is essentially a cloud service, Xu's resume and background are more suitable for the strategic level, so Huawei Cloud welcomes Zheng Yelai and Hou Jinlong.
Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei Cloud BU, made a major contribution to productizing Huawei Cloud. At present, Huawei Cloud has launched more than 2 10 cloud services and more than 2 10 solutions, which can provide complete services for most customers. Hou Jinlong, president of Huawei Cloud BG, was recruited by Yu Chengdong, which laid the foundation for Huawei Cloud to expand its private cloud, hybrid cloud and storage business.
The biggest problem for Hou and Zheng to lead Huawei's cloud development lies in their lack of handsome ability, that is, the ability to co-ordinate Huawei's entire system resources. The arrival of Yu Chengdong will solve the problem of how to integrate commanders and commanders and coordinate their development. Moreover, Yu Dazui's style of "speaking before doing" is completely different from Huawei's style of doing things, which also helps to establish the confidence of cloud business BG.
At present, cloud computing has 3A patterns in the world, namely AWS of Amazon, Azure of Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud of Alibaba. Huawei Cloud still has great opportunities. Gartner's latest report shows that Huawei Cloud 20 19 ranks sixth in the global IaaS, with a growth rate of 222.2%, the fastest in the world.
If Yu Chengdong can solve the internal friction and morale problems of Huawei Cloud, Huawei Cloud's dream of becoming "the top five clouds in the world" is just around the corner.
At present, Huawei is standing at the crossroads of fate.
Some Huawei employees said: In 20 19, the company defined the intelligent computing industry, which is the third industrial upgrading and transformation from fixed to mobile, from operators to enterprises, and from connection to computing.
However, at this turning point of fate, the blockade of foreign markets and technologies and the pain of internal transformation have put Huawei under considerable pressure. Yu Chengdong's achievements in consumer business also make him a trusted minister of Huawei. Today, Yu Chengdong is in charge of Huawei's three future-oriented core businesses, and also has brand-new strategic considerations for Huawei.
Yu Chengdong had previously put forward the strategy of 1+8+N for consumer business. 1 refers to the smart phone business, 8 refers to a series of businesses such as tablet computers, smart watches, VR glasses, car machines, etc., and N refers to pan-IOT devices. So far, the mobile phone business is not only a department that contributes one-third of Huawei's revenue, but also a channel for Huawei to get through C-side and B-side services.
As a Huawei employee shared in the intranet voice community, "How to avoid repeating the tragedy of the GE Internet of Things platform, and using mobile phone traffic in combination with the terminal cloud may be an option." Many Huawei employees agree with this view, because it will expand SaaS, and this wall-breaking breakthrough has a market of hundreds of billions of dollars. With the gradual improvement of search and recommendation technology, Huawei will be able to make a complete layout of the four-line industry.
In this strategic ecology, the bottom layer is the ICT level, which is Huawei's business and foundation. Up is a cloud computing and AI service that provides digital infrastructure capabilities; The next floor is the Internet of Things devices such as Huawei mobile phones, which can directly reach people; The next level is the HarmonyOS Internet of Things system, which unifies the scenes of life, home, car and work; Finally, Huawei's ecosystem has gathered outstanding C-end and B-end product developers around the world to improve Huawei's services.
Huawei seems to be moving in this direction at present. Recently, Huawei Cloud released the HMS ecological support plan, which provided 500 million yuan of cloud resources in the first batch, focusing on supporting 1500 HMS applications. In the commercial stage, each application will also be supported by advertising resources of up to 6.5438+0.2 million yuan.
Huawei's dream is great, but the challenge is arduous enough.
C-side business meets Apple, and B-side business challenges Microsoft, which has been established for more than 40 years. This also forced Huawei to choose to do something. For example, when Huawei appointed Yu Chengdong to be in charge of the smart car business, it was mentioned that if Huawei didn't build a car, whoever suggested building a car would be fired. When developing cloud computing and AI, we also choose to reduce the development scale of enterprise business.
Yu Cancheng turned the tide and became a general of ZTE. Who will lead Huawei to the next stage?
Judging from Yu Chengdong's resume, Tsinghua's graduation brought a better pattern and vision. In the field of communication, Yu Chengdong is the first inventor of the fourth generation distributed base station, which also proves that he is a technical talent. The success of Huawei's consumer business proves its excellent strategy and management ability. In the eyes of the public, the most intuitive feeling of the marketing ability of "Yu Dazui" is not important.
However, this task is arduous enough. The biggest challenge for Yu Chengdong is how to use limited resources to complete the transformation of Huawei. It is not difficult to see from some clues that Huawei is reducing its front line and focusing on core areas. For example, there are rumors that Huawei has left some Kirin 9000 chips to develop Mate 50 and P 50 to keep the mobile phone business warm; Hou Jinlong, the former president of Huawei Cloud, was transferred to the position of chairman of Digital Energy, which also helped Yu Chengdong to fully integrate mobile phones, automobiles, cloud computing and AI services.