Huawei Technologies has replaced more than 13,000 components in its products with local substitutes and redesigned over 4,000 circuit boards in the past three years, Founder Ren Zhengfei said, offering a glimpse of its efforts to overcome years of U.S. sanctions. Ren, 78, said the production of circuit boards has “stabilized” after the company developed replacement parts from domestic sources. He made the remarks in a speech at Nanjing University. Huawei will launch MetaERP, its own resources planning system, next month and fully use its own operating system, data system, compiler and language, he added. Ren delivered a speech during a February 24 seminar to thank the public and academics who participated in the company’s search for solutions to its technology predicament. The company will report its annual results later this month.
Shenzhen-based Huawei has been hit by U.S. sanctions in the past few years as technology rivalry intensified amid concerns about the company’s ties to the Chinese military. The Trump administration added Huawei to an export blacklist on national security grounds in 2019, hobbling its once-lucrative smartphone business. Ren said he was an advocate of Western technology when he was young and still admired Western tech after he founded Huawei, adding that even now he is not “anti-West”. “But all of a sudden, we were sanctioned, and they could not provide us with the components and tools, my mind went blank,” Ren said. Huawei spent USD23.8 billion on research and development (R&D) in 2022. After its smartphone business was impacted by the U.S. sanctions, the company began looking for more opportunities in enterprise solutions, such as helping traditional industries to digitalize their operations.
On ChatGPT, Ren said Microsoft’s OpenAI is not going to be the only dominant player in the field, but Huawei does not plan to work on it. The opportunity generated by ChatGPT means the industry will need more computing power, which will generate more demand for Huawei’s products, he added, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
