21 Feb 2019

Huawei flexes its R&D muscles at pre-MWC briefing

Huawei’s pre-Mobile World Congress briefing saw the unveiling of several new products and an emphasis on the company’s lead on R&D spending and the work it is doing to reduce mobile carriers’ operating costs.

Ryan Ding, Huawei’s carrier business group president, said that the company has already supplied more than 40,000 5G base stations (as of 20 February and has won more than 30 5G commercial contracts worldwide, including Europe, the Middle East and also in the Asia Pacific Region.

Huawei claims to have 80,000 R&D engineers, invests 15 per cent of its revenue in R&D (some €11.3 billion in 2018, which it says is more than that of all the other telecommunications vendors combined).

Huawei also claims that its 5G infrastructure equipment consumes (at a conservative estimate) thirty per cent less power compared with its competitors. Peter Zhou, Huawei’s chief marketing officer, said that a key reason for this is Huawei’s use of 7nm chipsets – “Our competitors have not even used the 10nm chips yet, they are still using 16 nanometres.”

Ding said that he firmly believes “that all our competitors now have useable 5G base stations. However, useable is different from good… I strongly encourage you to compare our products with the competition in terms of power consumption, performance, weight, size, deliverability and maintainability.”