Huawei, the embattled Chinese tech giant, on Monday vowed to weather wide-ranging US sanctions with a push into the intelligent vehicle sector and ramping up development of its own mobile phone ecosystem. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating CEO, said the company intends to spend one billion dollars in ventures involving electric vehicles and automobiles that use artificial intelligence, in collaboration with major Chinese automakers. It also intends to continue assisting in the creation of technologies for the upcoming superfast 5G connections, cloud storage, and the tech industry.
“With these portfolio changes, we are very sure we can survive,” Xu told a group of market analysts at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s southern technology centre. “So Huawei’s overall plan and concrete steps all revolve around enabling us to thrive and prosper in the long term under the entity listing,” he said.
The Former US President Donald Trump mounted an ambitious effort to isolate the organisation internationally in 2018, citing fears that the telecom networking infrastructure deployed around the world, could be used for spying or sabotage by China’s Communist Party regime. China and Huawei have vehemently denied the allegations, claiming that the US has never given proof.
The firm has been barred from the vast US market, has been cut off from global component supply chains, and has been pressured by allies to block or exclude Huawei equipment from their national telecom networks. The US President Joe Biden’s administration, which took office in January, has shown no signs of backing down on Huawei. Executives have hinted at a shift away from the company’s two core business divisions in recent months, but Xu’s remarks on Monday were the most detailed to date.
Huawei, along with Apple and Samsung, is the world’s leading producer of telecom networking equipment and has long been a top-three handset supplier. However, according to market trackers, it dropped out of the top three cell phone manufacturers in late 2020, as revenue collapsed due to trouble obtaining required components.
According to Chinese media, Chinese state-owned carmaker BAIC expects to introduce a new variant of its ArcFox electric vehicle line at next week’s Shanghai Auto Show, for which Huawei supplied operating components. Huawei also aims to collaborate with other Chinese automakers on hybrid or intelligent cars, a rapidly rising segment in China, according to Xu. It would also increase efforts to create its own cell phone operating system, following the US activities that prevented it from using Google’s Android operating system. Given the global stranglehold of Android and Apple’s iOS systems, analysts believe this to be a difficult challenge. Huawei claims it can provide a competitive solution by using its already strong user base.
