Inside China Tech: Huawei CEO raises stakes on tech development amid coronavirus
- China has turned to hi-tech tools in a big way to provide the nation with a sense of normalcy in the face of the coronavirus outbreak
Hello, This is Bien Perez from the SCMP’s technology desk, with a wrap of our leading stories from last week.
“Over 200,000 scientists, experts and engineers worked overtime during the Lunar New Year holiday because we’re racing to develop new [technologies],” Ren, 75, said in an interview with the SCMP this week. Without elaborating, he referred to the work in progress as “something which will keep us ahead of the global competition”.
“The US will continue to increase sanctions on us, and we will have to complete [the new technologies] before than happens,” Ren said.
“It’s not a problem for us to survive as a company, but it’s questionable whether we can keep our leading position,” Ren said. “We won’t be able to lead the world in the next three to five years if we cannot develop our own technology.”
Still, Ren said neither the US sanctions nor the pandemic has had a major impact on Huawei’s operations: “We believe the impact is minimal, and we can pull through it.”
Huawei has resumed more than 90 per cent of its production and development operations, he said. The company has also kept its supply chain mostly intact by helping provide its partners with protective gear for workers to keep production going.
Coronavirus lockdown shows digital future of life, work in China
“The outbreak has exposed the vulnerability of some offline businesses,” said Frank Yang, a senior analyst at research firm Analysys. “There will definitely be a need for new online, digital development.”
While online working and learning are nothing new in China, wider acceptance of these tools could expedite the digitisation of businesses and whole industries – a major part of Beijing’s hi-tech ambition to establish a powerful digital infrastructure for the world’s second largest economy.
Some of the most popular business apps in February, for example, included Alibaba’s Dingtalk, Tencent’s WeChat Work and Tencent Meetings, Huawei’s Welink, ByteDance’s Lark and Pinduoduo’s Knock. Alibaba is the SCMP’s parent company.
“Protracted disruption amid the pandemic will force most firms to make up their minds and go digital,” said Zhang Xinhong, a research director at government think tank the State Information Centre of China, in a recent webinar. He said remote working, e-commerce, online education and other digital services “will now become new options for more companies”.
Chinese smartphone giants pause manufacturing in India
That directive is expected to result in a decline this year in India’s smartphone market, the world’s second largest after China, as manufacturers comply with the order and domestic consumption slows down during that period, according to analysts.
Apple’s main iPhone assemblers, Foxconn and Wistron, as well as South Korea’s Samsung and LG have also temporarily halted work at their plants in India in line with the directive.
The projected slowdown may prove to be a bigger a concern for China’s major Android smartphone companies, which sell the most popular models in India.
And that’s all for this week. Until next time.
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