Huawei Study Tour to China - part 3

Huawei Study Tour to China
Huawei Study Tour to China - part 2

Over the weekend the students have to prepare their reports covering certain topics to be presented on Monday at the Huawei Wireless R&D premises in Shanghai. This was a real challenge to the students, as they had one day only (Saturday, Sunday as a backup) to prepare a short text and a presentation, of course in English. And, furthermore, the teams were mixed in terms of their study background (Information Systems, Informatics/ IT, Engineering Management, and others) as well as coming from different Universities from all parts of Switzerland.

On Monday: Showtime! In the presence of Jack li, VP of Huawei's Wireless R&D Center in Shanghai, the four groups gave their presentations about HR and Culture, Cyber Security, R&D, and Marketing at Huawei.n All of them had a very good and professional level especially considering the challenges they had to face.

One could summarize the main messages of the four presentations as follows:

• Huawei is a highly innovative company
• ... based on its special corporate culture.
• End-to-end Cyber Security is deeply integrated into all processes and products.
• Marketing is a real challenge in a global ICT company with three business groups based in China serving different competitive markets in the world. 

In the Enterprise as well as in the Carrier business group my advice would be to analyse and to listen carefully to the customers of Huawei's customers. In the end, the end customer, be it a business or the consumer, has a need for a solution serving his or her needs. Therefore Huawei should follow long-term trends, such as Industry 4.0, Smart Cities or Cloud based Services to learn about (possible) future market developments.
This will enable Huawei to focus on respective technological innovations at a very early stage and thus may gain a decisive competitive advantage. Technology - and Huawei is a leading technology provider - can be considered as the most important enabler, but not necessarily the main driver of many developments. An in-depth understanding of general management and business, as well as social developments, are crucial to staying on top as a technology provider.


Finally, the students got their certificates handed over through Axel Menning and Jack Li.

Jonas Hubamann, FHS St. Gallen,
with Axel Menning and Jack Li

Fabian Diehl, FHS St. Gallen,
with Axel Menning and Jack Li

After the ceremony, the group had its final joint lunch in the Huawei canteen.

Queuing for lunch

A more or less typical canteen lunch
(selection of dishes by me)

There are some other things I would like to mention after staying in China for eight days:

I like Green Tea very much, and I thought China will be the paradise for drinking and buying green tea. For buying green (and other) teas it was really a paradise; there are plenty of opportunities not only to buy but also to taste different tea flavours.
But in hotels and restaurants, I hardly got any green tea! In our hotel in Shanghai which serves Chinese breakfast I had to ask for green tea in the morning; and in most of the restaurants where we had Chinese style lunch or dinner it was nearly impossible to get a pot of tea - beer, wine or soft drinks were plenty available.

While Europe is discussing more train safety in these days the Shanghai subway screens every bigger bag or backpack like at the airport before you enter the subway station. Furthermore, in the subway system you can count an endless number of cameras.

Google is a nice way to experience Chinese pragmatism. On the one hand, popular Google services such as Gmail, Google search or Google maps are not accessible at all in China due to governmental regulation; but most of the plenty Chinese Smartphone manufacturers are using Android as an operating system like Huawei does.
And it's even very likely that the next version of Google's Nexus phone will be made by Huawei. As long as it's good for business, western Know How and technology is welcome. But services which allow free speech and which cannot be controlled by the government are unwanted and thus banned.

Overall, China is a country of contradictions. Capitalistic behavior can be seen nearly everywhere in the streets of cities like Shanghai, in and off the center. But at the same time blogger get arrested or a single person, the journalist Wang Xiaolu, found be guilty to have caused the recent stock exchange crisis in China, without any trial.

All photos are available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license