Huawei "29% of Last Year's Revenue Invested in R&D... Focus on Autonomous Driving and Cloud"

MWC 2023 Press Conference Held
"Neutral Stance on Open RAN"
"Support for More Bandwidth"... Frequency Reallocation Variable

[Barcelona=Asia Economy Reporter Oh Su-yeon] "Huawei has invested 230 billion dollars in research and development (R&D) over the past 10 years. Last year, Huawei's expected revenue was about 92 billion dollars, and it invested 27 billion dollars, accounting for 29%, in R&D alone."

Jang Jeongjun, Vice President of Huawei's Asia-Pacific External Cooperation and Public Relations Division, said this at a press conference for Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 held in Barcelona, Spain, on the 27th of last month (local time).

Jang Jeongjun, Vice President of External Cooperation and Public Relations at Huawei Asia Pacific, is answering questions at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 press conference held in Barcelona, Spain, on the 27th of last month (local time).
[Photo by Huawei]

Huawei is a representative Chinese company hit by U.S. trade sanctions. Although its smartphone business and others have faltered, it is overcoming the crisis by securing technological superiority through large-scale R&D investment. Vice President Jang said, "Huawei's ICT sector is generating stable revenue, and we are striving to maintain stable sales in the device sector as well," adding, "Due to the U.S.-China conflict, there has been a change in Huawei's overall business direction. We are focusing on digital power, smart cars (autonomous driving), and cloud sectors."

The United States is promoting Open RAN to weaken the influence of Chinese telecommunications equipment companies such as Huawei ahead of the commercialization of 6G. This technology separates telecommunications equipment into hardware and software, enabling interoperability between equipment from different manufacturers. This reduces the influence of equipment vendors in the telecommunications market. Vice President Jang stated, "Huawei maintains a neutral stance on Open RAN-related technologies and continues related research," and added, "We plan to develop technology with an open attitude according to international standards."

LG Uplus has partially introduced Huawei equipment in 5G base stations in the metropolitan area and other regions. Although the 5G frequency bandwidth and quality are proportional, services have been provided with an 80 MHz bandwidth until now. This was a disadvantage compared to competitors using 100 MHz bandwidth. Last year, LG Uplus was additionally allocated a 20 MHz bandwidth, allowing the three companies to use the same 100 MHz bandwidth. Son Ru-won, CEO of Huawei Korea, said, "With the additional frequency allocation, there will definitely be improvements in performance and user experience," but added, "However, it is difficult to predict specifically how much and in what way it will improve. Nevertheless, since the Korean government conducts annual network performance evaluations, we will be able to confirm through this year's results."

Vice President Jang said, "Compared to other companies, Huawei's 5G products support more bandwidth, consume less energy, are lighter, and support more capacity," and added, "We will be able to show the results of Huawei's performance in this year's government network performance tests."

In particular, as additional allocation of 5G frequencies in the 3.7?4.0 GHz band is anticipated, attention is expected to increase on Huawei's Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology. CA technology is necessary to combine non-adjacent frequency bands, and currently, other equipment manufacturers except Huawei are known to support a maximum bandwidth of 400 MHz. Huawei has previously unveiled base station equipment supporting 800 MHz bandwidth. A Huawei official said, "In the situation of expanding 5G frequencies, Huawei is the only company that can broaden the selection range in frequency auctions," and added, "We hope Korean companies will recognize Huawei's technological capabilities."

Son Lu-won, CEO of Huawei Korea, is answering questions at a press conference for Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 held in Barcelona, Spain, on the 27th of last month (local time).
[Photo by Huawei]

Regarding the recent security incident at LG Uplus, some have claimed that the issue might be caused by Huawei equipment such as backdoors. However, Huawei dismissed such concerns. Vice President Jang said, "Rumors about backdoors and the like have no substantial evidence or reality," and added, "At our headquarters in Dongguan, China, there is a space where equipment and source codes can be closely inspected, and we transparently verify and show them upon customer requests."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.