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They did not leave the cars inside anymore. We had to take the crowded train, get off at the next station and head to the hired driver. That's what I got when I got off my plane in Hong Kong on a Monday night, as a fourth day of protests at the city's international airport reached a breaking point. It was a bit surreal. I passed protesters dressed in black, most of their faces concealed by gas masks or bandanas, full of literature about their city and their concerns about its future.
After a bit of anticipation and a lot of pressure, I jumped on a train full-heavy with Myriam Joire, a veteran of the mobile information industry (and an occasional contributor from the AP), and we rubbed shoulders with a hundred of our closest friends, as conditioning was hard to follow. About twenty minutes later, we arrived at the station, only to find more protesters – but these were not demonstrating. A handful of bandanna youths went to the station turnstiles that their compatriots kept open. This was probably intended to help other protesters not to pay for the train ride for the event, but it also spared many anxious and diverted travelers. We went through the increasingly crowded station and headed to the stifling pickup area (it was 90F with 80% humidity – at 8pm). Finally, we found our driver as taxi lines began to spread for tens of kilometers and quickly headed for the Chinese border.
The cameras in China are really everywhere.
In general, I do not write these kinds of stories about press trips, it's because press trips are very boring, for want of anything better. And sometimes, this trip was not different. There have certainly been less exciting moments. But as a person who had only been to the Chinese mainland once before (and for 36 hours at that time), I was eager to get to know the city where a really impressive number of smartphones are produced in the world. world. So, it's not a phone story, per se, but it's not a story about smartphones either. It's just the one I felt obliged to write.
Huawei was founded in Shenzhen. The city's relationship with society is therefore profound, a source of economic and national pride.
Crossing the Chinese border from Hong Kong is a strange but generally effective affair. At the same time, Myriam and I had short-term journalist visas we had obtained for the return trip to the United States, which simplified the whole process. Our driver gave our passports to the border services officer, looked at us, gave them back, and went to the border crossing itself. At that time, we were asked to get out of the car and cross the customs with our luggage (this is necessary to enter China from Hong Kong). After a simple fingerprint check, a picture of the face and an X-ray of the luggage, everything was finished in less than five minutes. We went out on the other side, we got back in the same car we had just got out and headed to the hotel in Shenzhen. Huawei set up a group of about fifteen other journalists and YouTubers, and the next day we would all visit a local Huawei campus for a number of visits.
Visits were, to put it nicely, less than fascinating (I have at least taken some pictures for use on the site). But we received a presentation that deeply mesmerized me: the story of Huawei's overflight and its relationship with the city of Shenzhen, a "special economic zone" inside China. Huawei was founded in Shenzhen (today's world capital of smartphones), and the city's relations with the company are deep, source of economic and national pride. After hearing about this story, I just wanted to know more.
From the army to Shezhen's wealth
The story that Huawei tells about his founder, Ren Zhengfei, largely eliminates the mystery surrounding the man. Zhengfei has been the subject of numerous speculation online, largely false. After reading a number of interviews and hearing more about him in the company's official story – and I hate being a buzzkill – there is little evidence to suggest he was ever involved in government or Chinese espionage. The much more credible story is that Zhengfei was a very poor young man, very briefly employed in the army, who was trying to fight his way through a dangerous period in China.
Like many of them, Zhengfei chose to join the PLA (Chinese Army) in the late 1970s because it offered a life of certainty. He was fascinated with technology and engineering from an early age and was given the role of communications engineer. Zhengfei's time in the PLA was neither glamorous nor particularly easy: he tells the story of a chemical engineering plant that he was responsible for building in northern China in the dead of winter, with temperatures below -20 degrees Celsius. Their shelter and equipment were so minimal that they slept in turn, taking turns replacing fuel in the small stove that was between them and was dying of cold all night.
It was at this time, in the late 1970s, that China was approaching the end of a disastrous period known as the Cultural Revolution. But things were going to change. Just a few years after his service, Zhengfei was removed from office in the context of a downsizing of the Chinese army. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed young Chinese were spread all over the country and Zhengfei was fortunate to be sent to Shenzhen. After meeting several local companies in the early and mid-1980s, Zhengfei had an idea for his own business: importing telephone switching equipment into China. At that time, the penetration rate of telephone service in China was among the lowest in the world – lower than that of the most underdeveloped African countries. Zhengfei, however, believed that this would change in the years to come. In 1987, with the equivalent of about $ 3,500 of initial capital, he founded Huawei.
Zhengfei's fledgling company has imported Hong Kong's PBX equipment (mainly analog phone switch cards) for sale in mainland China. But Huawei has avoided selling to highly competitive hubs such as Beijing or Shanghai, but rather to customers in emerging urban markets or hard-to-reach rural markets. As the business started to grow, Zhengfei's suppliers realized that they could make more money in China by removing the middleman, and stopped selling their products to Huawei. Zhengfei had considered this possibility and in the early 1990s he began hiring engineers to design a product in-house. In 1994, Huawei was ready: its first independently developed product was on sale (unsurprisingly, it was a telephone switch), the C & C08. And it's here that things get a little more complicated in Huawei's story.
According to the story that was told to us, Huawei's first products – combined with Zhengfei's relentless adherence to a philosophy of "customer is always right" – arrived at the right time. In 1992, the government launched an initiative to significantly expand telephony in rural China, fueling Huawei's first explosive phase of growth. Suddenly, counties and cities across China were exploiting telecommunications providers, and they, as well as the businesses that would become their customers, needed equipment. It was a perfect fit: Huawei was ready to go places and chase opportunities that his foreign competitors simply did not want to touch, and it became a national success almost overnight. The number of telephone subscribers in China in 1991 was only nine million. In 1995, they were 135 million. It is in these critical years that Huawei has become the telecommunications giant that it is today.
Huawei was ready to go places and chase opportunities that his foreign competitors simply did not want to touch.
Huawei has repeatedly come back to the idea that it is not only its competitive practices and the availability of its products that have led to this success, but also its unwavering commitment to customer loyalty. Loyalty is a deeply rooted concept in business in China. Huawei understood it better than more advanced and technically capable foreign companies. An anecdote about Huawei's commitment to customers shared by our presenter is that of a small hotel whose switching equipment is frequently used, but only at night. When the client complained of the problem, Zhengfei sent a group of technicians to investigate and they remained awake late in the wee hours of the morning in the hope of discovering the cause. Across the floor of the hotel, they heard their response. Rats chewed in isolated telephone wiring, a destructive or even unusually harmful nuisance. But instead of telling the company to call on an exterminator, Huawei's engineers acted in an unusual way: they tried to solve the problem. They managed to design a rat-resistant cable insulation that was much more difficult to chew on animals. It's a cute story, and although I have no particular reason to doubt it, it still sounds great. a story. But it must be admitted that this is a good example.
A trip to the city of smartphones
Being a guest at one of China's richest and most influential societies is certainly an experience in itself, even apart from all the other reasons we were there. It certainly helps that the five-star hotels in Shenzhen are not very expensive, but despite everything, it was clear that Huawei wanted us to have a taste of what it provides to its affluent customers around the world. The lunch we received in Huawei's private VIP dining area in one of the many cafeteria buildings is particularly memorable. A large multi-level white marble water plan greeted us as we were climbing an escalator to the dining room, where two women were performing a tea ceremony elaborated at the center. from an indoor pond. After finishing our meal worthy of a Michelin star (it was really amazing, easily the culmination of the trip's food), the interpreters of the tea ceremony were joined by a Chinese string quartet traditional.
Huawei is sure to provide lunch and a show for his exclusive VIP dinner.
Imagine: entire hotels that you can not really book, and world-class white tablecloth restaurants where no amount of money can get you a table.
One of our hosts informed us that this facility, as well as many others, is in fact managed by Huawei's in-house hotel company. Its client base is so vast and its commitment to it so profound that Huawei operates hotels, restaurants, spas and other services strictly for its customers and guests. None is open to the public. Imagine: entire hotels that you can not really book, and world-class white tablecloth restaurants where no amount of money can get you a table. It really gives you an idea of Huawei's incredible stature – but it's not until the next day that we'll go somewhere that would really lead to this point.
Shenzhen is a fascinating place, constantly prey to development, growth, destruction and revitalization. It is also a city of real historical significance. It was designated as the first "special economic zone" in China in 1980. Shenzhen became the national laboratory of capitalism in the country: for the first time, companies were allowed to keep most of their profits, salaries and revenues. promote employees based on their productivity rather than their seniority, take money from foreign investors, rent land and seek growth and new opportunities for their own benefit, not just that of the Chinese nation. Huawei emerged from this chamber of incubation of market forces and, whether or not society is thought to be independent, it was an entirely new type of entity in the rigid and planned economy. from China.
In 1980, a photo of the downtown Shenzhen skyline was taken from a dirt road a few miles outside the city; a handful of medium-rise buildings appeared in the distance (probably government offices), but otherwise the landscape was rural. A photo taken from the same point of view five years later portrayed a busy cobblestone street and the skyline of a growing metropolis. The rise of Shenzhen was unprecedented in China and led to the creation of new regions over the years. Today, Shenzhen is a truly massive city: it is the 10th most populous city in the world (12.5 million inhabitants) and remains one of the most productive cities in China, with an estimated GDP of more than 365 billion, even exceeding Hong Kong in 2018. the scale of Shenzhen can be difficult to describe; it is almost hard to believe in the number of apartment buildings over 30 floors even on the outskirts of the city.
Shenzhen is also a city of contrasts. Despite a fleet of fully electrified buses and taxis, as well as the sheer volume of new SUVs and saloons on downtown streets, many citizens are riding pedalless electric bicycles that look like glued moped conversions. together. . With the hordes of Meituan delivery drivers (think of Uber Eats or Deliveroo, but China), they show how China's rapidly evolving economy has produced interesting juxtapositions. But it is quite obvious that Shenzhen is a jewel of China's richness: luxury car service is widely available, fantastic skyscrapers and 5-star hotels abound, and high fashion boutiques are many. If you want to see how the wealthy wealthy of the great Chinese capitalist experience spend their hard-earned money, downtown Shenzhen should be near the top of your list. But stroll through the oldest parts of the sprawling metropolis and you'll find that buildings lose their luster and luster, cars get older (and smaller), scooters get denser and shops become much more … interesting.
Basically, everything in this giant mall is wrong.
While most of the group I was shopping with had visited one of Shenzhen's most famous electronic markets, I went with a few others on the so-called commercial market. Here – provided you know where to look and who to ask for – you can find almost any clothing, accessories or desirable products from well-known brands. The problem is that everything is wrong. Many of you are likely to know the type of imitations you could find in a market of cities like Hong Kong or Taipei (and many online sales sites); the brand names are deliberately misspelled, the details have been deliberately altered and the quality is clearly suspect. Go to the right store and talk to the right person in one of Shenzhen's commercial markets, and you'll see products that can not be distinguished visually and qualitatively from reality, with the exception of brand protection experts employed by counterfeit companies. The stickers that hold the tissues together in their official boxes are not just imitations, they are black market counterfeits, many of which end up being considered authentic around the world.
These are not just imitations, they are counterfeits of the black market
And despite what you may hear, China does not turn a blind eye to these sophisticated operations: the store we visited often hid the goods we were looking at as the police tried to surprise sellers in the act ( It was not for dramatic effect – they were deadly serious). The proposed article catalogs were concealed in false backs behind cabinets. The logo-free handbags were on display and, when sold, one of the owner's employees was going elsewhere to retrieve the offending loop. Another would make a stamping machine to press the company logo on the leather, using an imprint kept far away on a random shelf of the store and bring it back to its hiding place as quickly. I bought a watch (which I found less convincing than handbags).
From Paris to P30
The next morning, we woke up and took our official Huawei buses. We would drive 90 minutes north of Dongguan, where Huawei's newest corporate campus is located. And even though I had seen some pictures, read books about it, and generally understood that it was big enough, I was not yet fully prepared for what I saw.
Yes, it's as big as the photo makes it look. Yes, it is in China.
In one sentence, Huawei built a private European city in central China with its own tram system. The buildings and the attention to detail were breathtaking. This really plunges you into an authentic feeling of being on an iconic block of the 12 European cities on which Huawei modeled each sector. We started in Paris in a covered metro station, which of course had its own full-service café. The quality of the stone from which the resort was built was well worth it: polished granite covered every inch of the square.
All aboard.
The cost of building this small piece of the largest campus was to be immense. The rest was no less impressive, as we were sitting on the perimeter train line (there are two – and eventually there will be others) that surround most of the currently built portions of the village . We stopped in the German city of Heidelberg's storytelling, with its iconic stone bridge.
Walking through the carefully patterned streets and looking at the rows and rows of windows, I wondered what was in those dozens of European apartments, in all those lanes and in the corridors of these castles. The answer, it turns out, is considerably less romantic than architecture. The campus is the new epicenter of Huawei's R & D activities. Most windows in many buildings are completely obstructed by white blinds. We went to a typical European street cafe for a buffet lunch – with fresh sushi, various Chinese dishes, "Italian" meatballs (that was not the case) and what went on for pizza – but that was almost everything.
Despite its inviting aesthetics, Huawei's new campus is an extremely secure area, with the vast majority of its employees not even allowed to access it. It's a shame to know that all this is probably filled with generic office cubicles, because the magnitude and sense of immersion make your imagination crazy. We crossed the old bridge of Heidelberg, which did not lead to the other side of the Neckar River, but to a Parisian palace not quite Luxemburgish, not quite from Versailles, and came back on the buses which driving. However, our next stop may have been even more exciting than most of you, Hollywood-style wonders from Dongguan: we were going to visit a live smartphone production line, which produces the all-new P30 Pros.
As you can guess, there are few cosmetic embellishments in a cell phone factory, all made of corrugated steel and antistatic floors. It was about as spectacular as possible from our morning visit to Europe. Our group donned the obligatory clothes and hats of the clean room and, for an hour a little sweaty, followed each of the steps necessary to take out a smartphone of chips and a piece of PCB in a shiny film box retractable to a warehouse the world. Building a smartphone requires many prefabricated components, but it remains quite surprising to see how much work is being done on the assembly line.
These rows of tape dispensers look like the way chips are stored before being mounted on the circuit board.
All microchips are mounted on the basic circuit board (a process known as SMT), and the chips themselves are routed via ribbon rolls into fully automated machines that deposit them on the board. There is no one on the SMT line, apart from those who are sometimes responsible for replacing the supply of cards and rolls of component tapes as and when they are consumed. Even the card flaw inspection process is so complex and time consuming that it would be impossible for a human to make it – a special camera examines each mounted component and verifies that its placement and location are correct, at which point the cards are moved to high temperature flow furnaces to complete the assembly process.
Whatcha cookin? Phones.
After baking, the boards have major components like battery, display, cameras, and various other discrete parts installed (a handful of people put some of these parts, machines complete the process), until that they reach the last person. the assembly line. The work of this person? Mounting the prefabricated back cover on the phone. It's not really glamorous. Once the back cover is paired, you have a smartphone "done" – sort of.
Huawei says that he can spit a handset finished and ready to be shipped every 28 seconds
Each handset is then placed in a protective plastic case and a machine puts it in a sort of drawer that is supported by a small traveling robot that transports it in the second half of the line: quality assurance and packaging. Test software has been flashed on phones, machines perform a series of tests (even a basic drop test is performed on each phone), install the operating system and send them later. The last part of the phone trip has the largest number of people involved, such as final quality assurance, (serious) cleaning and packaging. At first, I found it strange – the cleaning and packing seem to be done by a machine. But while I was writing this piece, I realized a simple and practical reality: humans cost a lot less and it would be unlikely that they present a real bottleneck if the assembly process is not done much faster. Nevertheless, the number of humans on each line is low: less than a dozen in total, and there is no doubt that this number will continue to diminish as time and technology advance.
Fewer and fewer people are using smartphone assembly lines.
Huawei says it can spit a complete handset ready to send every 28 seconds on each assembly line and that these strings can be quickly and easily reconfigured to produce a completely different phone depending on what needs to be built. Each floor of each factory probably has fifteen assembly lines and each plant has several floors. You can do the math, but think about this: Huawei has delivered more than 200 million phones in 2018. This requires a production capacity of 550,000 smartphones per day, some of these days requiring much more peak capacity during major launches of appliances. Even though Huawei shares some of the burden with outsourcing manufacturers like Foxconn, the numbers are staggering. And no, free samples have not been provided.
Do things the Huawei
Much of the rest of our trip was marked by scary briefings, exhibition demonstrations and excessive meals. Huawei's commitment to hospitality was unwavering: every morning at the company's Executive Training Center briefing, we were served coffee and teas, fine pastries and fresh fruit (each seat was also stocked in Evian water and mint candy Mentos). ). All we needed was just a question of asking. And I think this attitude is clearly intended to demonstrate Huawei's values as a company – values that they really seem to take very seriously.
Even as an American, as a foreigner, I had a hard time imagining such a dynamic, proud and legitimately innovative enterprise as a hidden branch of government that seeks to spy on the world. A single piece of evidence that Huawei would have allowed such an activity would destroy his credibility, and probably all his activities. And while China's favorable domestic corporate policies have undoubtedly played an important role in Huawei's meteoric rise, I have yet to find evidence of any evidence of a company other than the one that played an important role. There is no doubt that Huawei is a ruthless competitor in the global market, both in its mobile handset business and in its networks, but which company in its position would not be?
As I wandered aimlessly around the Huawei 5G Exhibition Center as part of a new tour, I was surprised. In a library, there was internally published literature for visitors and employees. I found one called On The Record, which in its current volume, is a collection of unpublished transcripts of Ren Zhengfei's interviews with Western media earlier this year. All the media outlets present had to accept that their complete records of hearing were published. Much of the content was about the continued banishment of Huawei by the United States and the arrest of Zhengfei's daughter in Canada (where she has always remained), but the founder of Huawei also shared some other interesting things of which I am not sure that they appear in the different stories that these interviews have reached. He cleared up several seemingly fabricated anecdotes – he played no role in the black swans on the campus of the company (he did not like them), he did not cook the soup for his employees in the first days (he did them once braised pig head on a business trip to Turkey), but it's not the anecdotes themselves that struck me, but also his frankness sometimes. It was an absent father who did not really know his children. He admired the American economic and legal system. He thought that many of his middle and senior managers were so rich that they were more productive and probably more necessary. Il a supposé que l’objectif de la Chine de devenir une superpuissance technologique mondiale ne serait pas réalisable de son vivant. Il pensait que «Huawei» était une mauvaise réputation quand il a fondé la société, mais il n’avait pas l’argent nécessaire pour remplir les documents nécessaires pour la changer. Aucune de ces déclarations ne justifiait ni ne réfutait les revendications de l'Amérique à l'encontre de Huawei – il n'avait aucune raison de le dire, vraiment. Mais il semblait vraiment que Zhengfei se dévoilait lui-même et sa compagnie.
Après avoir lu toutes ces entrevues et tous les négations catégoriques et sans équivoque de Zhengfei – allant même jusqu'à dire que lui, un membre du parti communiste chinois – fermerait entièrement son entreprise avant d'accepter d'installer des portes dérobées dans l'équipement de Huawei – je me demandais quoi Huawei pourrait faire ou dire gagner la confiance du gouvernement américain. Je pense maintenant que la réponse est «rien». Cela ne veut pas dire que Huawei ne cache rien, ou que ses liens avec le gouvernement ne seraient pas inévitablement minimisés de manière officielle. Mais il n’ya pas eu de véritable arme à feu suggérant que Huawei est une marionnette de l’État, mais simplement qu’il est un bénéficiaire important des politiques du gouvernement chinois qui bénéficient à de nombreuses entreprises chinoises. Et bien que son bilan en matière de propriété intellectuelle soit loin d’être impeccable (et un domaine sur lequel je trouve l’ignorance professée par Zhengfei est risible), l’espionnage des entreprises est un phénomène mondial. Huawei semble juste être particulièrement mal à le couvrir, et c'est un problème que je n'ai pas encore vu l'adresse de l'entreprise de manière sérieuse et crédible.
Huawei présente un drone aérien "5G" (il s'agit d'un 5G car il dispose d'un point chaud 5G)
Huawei est au bord d'une catastrophe potentielle, presque totalement hors de son contrôle.
Notre dernier dîner du voyage a eu lieu dans un restaurant japonais, au quatrième étage de l’un des innombrables gratte-ciel de Shenzhen. Le repas était excellent; De grandes assiettes de sashimi joliment agencées, des petits pains savamment conçus et des bouteilles de Dassai 23 (une bière à ne pas manquer pour les vrais amateurs de saké) étaient alignés autour de la table. Je peux presque goûter à la tempura parfaitement croquante et à la saveur sucrée fondante de la bouche de l'unagi. C'était de la nourriture à retenir. C’était aussi un autre exemple de l’hospitalité sans fin de Huawei. Lors de voyages comme ceux-ci, vous avez toujours l’intention de vous sentir gâté et je mentirais si je disais que cela ne fonctionne pas – je mange ou je reste rarement comme cela en vacances, sans parler de voyages d’affaires. Mais suspendre sur toute l'hospitalité, la nourriture sans fin, l'hôtel de luxe et les campus opulents était un sous-texte clair. Huawei est au bord d'une catastrophe potentielle, presque totalement hors de son contrôle. La seule fois où je l’ai vu (et même alors, implicitement) était une démonstration d’Honor Vision TV, qui gère le nouveau système d’exploitation Harmony de la société. Je crois que le but non déclaré de cette démonstration – d’une télévision chinoise qui ne serait probablement pas vendue hors de Chine, présentée à un groupe d’Américains – était de prouver que le système d’exploitation de Huawei était réel. Je peux vous dire que j'ai vu une télévision intelligente en état de marche et qu'il exécutait une sorte de logiciel. Mais cela n’était nullement une indication que Huawei serait capable d’éviter les conséquences de sanctions potentiellement invalidantes pour les États-Unis.
En visitant Huawei pendant une période aussi périlleuse pour la société, vous pensiez que tout le monde serait sur des punaises. Et sans aucun doute, beaucoup, beaucoup d'employés de Huawei le sont. Mais entre les villages européens idylliques, les usines ronronnantes et la Rolls Royce garée devant le bureau, nous avons tenu la plupart de nos séances d’information, vous ne le sauriez jamais.
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