W24 - Is Huawei Technology-Driven?

I watched the HarmonyOS 2.0 launch last week and felt exhilarated, as if it were already inevitable. The most memorable line was from Dr. Wang Chenglu: the key idea is that the shift from feature phones to smartphones achieved a free combination of software, making the phone a super terminal for software; the shift from smartphones to HarmonyOS achieves a free combination of hardware, making HarmonyOS a super terminal for hardware. Looking back at pioneers like Red Flag and Alibaba’s YunOS, HarmonyOS is clearly a new-era hero that is both distinct and specialized. It hits the window of technological transition, has powerful ecological appeal, and a sufficiently pragmatic global perspective—reason enough to be excited.

Huawei also has many leading technical products—Kunpeng, Kirin; it seems they’ve developed almost every notable mythic beast from the classics. It’s easy to conclude that Huawei is a technology-driven company. After reviewing various Huawei materials over the past months, I no longer see it that way. Gree can master core technologies, but technology is not ultimately what drives it. I’ve noticed that companies that call themselves “technology-driven” rarely feel truly great; genuinely great companies never label themselves that way. Some firms use “technology-driven” as a slogan, perhaps just to present an image to the market.

You could say Huawei is driven by survival instinct, creativity, or vision, but not by technology—because that label is misleading. Using a hammer to look for nails is behavior guided by a technology-driven mindset. In fact, Huawei does not treat technology as its final driving force; enduring success is its ultimate challenge. Huawei began foundational 5G research roughly a decade ago and deliberately pushed into uncharted territory to break the industry’s 4G ceiling and create new growth. In 1999, when Huawei was still small, it invited IBM for corporate consulting, spending 2 billion RMB in the first phase—nearly a quarter of that year’s sales—and retained IPD and other management tools that served Huawei for years.

Writer Guo Jianlong, who has traveled extensively in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, said in a speech that, in his experience, Huawei is currently the only Chinese brand that has genuinely gone global.