Huawei Technologies‘ chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, on Tuesday extolled the US-sanctioned company’s resilience on multiple fronts – from artificial intelligence (AI) chip development to growing adoption of its own mobile operating system, HarmonyOS – in a morale-boosting New Year’s Eve message.
Over the past six years, Huawei “experienced countless moments of darkness, uncertainty and defeat”, but has also seen “one miracle after another, making the impossible possible”, Meng, daughter of Huawei founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei, wrote in a message published by the Shenzhen-based firm.
Meng, 52, thanked Huawei’s customers, supply chain partners and employees for a groundbreaking year. In October, she assumed for the second time the position of rotating and acting chairwoman at Huawei for a six-month tenure that ends on March 31.
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She pointed out that hybrid engineering teams achieved breakthroughs – in areas of heat dissipation, power supply, high-speed transmission and chip reliability – as Huawei operated a dozen laboratories, where it worked with partners to design semiconductors, including high-bandwidth memory chips, used for training AI models.
The past 12 months also represented a “crucial” year to foster adoption of HarmonyOS Next, which no longer supports Android-based apps.
Huawei completed in just a year what took other firms 10 years in terms of developing an operating system, according to Meng.
Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies’ consumer business group, speaks at the launch event of HarmonyOS Next in Shenzhen on October 22, 2024. Photo: Xinhua alt=Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei Technologies’ consumer business group, speaks at the launch event of HarmonyOS Next in Shenzhen on October 22, 2024. Photo: Xinhua>
As rotating chairwoman, Meng’s end-of-the-year message reflects how she continues to help steward US-blacklisted Huawei’s comeback in the 5G smartphone market, while overseeing advanced chip development efforts in spite of rigid US sanctions.
In a recent message to new employees, Huawei board member Vincent Peng Bo said the company’s consumer business “managed to survive, thanks in part to domestic consumers’ enthusiasm”. He added, however, that “there’s still a long way to go” for Huawei amid various tech restrictions.
“Sanctions have caused us significant inconvenience,” Peng, who serves as president of Huawei’s global procurement qualification management department, said. “But our research and development team, along with supply chain colleagues, have spent five years to basically achieving independence of our supplies.”
He said Huawei must keep its supply chain open to overseas companies to stay competitive. Primarily relying on the domestic supply chain would only make Huawei closed and isolated.
The company, for example, uses memory chips from SK Hynix in its latest flagship smartphone, the Mate 70 Pro, according to a report by Canadian research firm TechInsights. The South Korean supplier said that it has strictly complied with US restrictions imposed on Huawei.
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