Although considered a threat to national security in the United States, Huawei remains the largest network equipment provider in the world. In the United States, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, wireless service providers are not allowed to use the company's equipment to create their 5G networks. Indeed, the society could be forced to collect information (in other words, spies) on behalf of the Chinese communist government if it asked it.
Countries accounting for 40% of global GDP being fined and their operators using Huawei network equipment for the next generation of wireless connectivity, the company spends a lot on research and development (R & D). According to Bloomberg, Huawei spent $ 15.3 billion on research last year, double what it had spit five years ago. Of the ten largest companies in the world in terms of R & D spending, only one has committed funds for this type of spending at a faster rate than Huawei. It would be Amazon. Huawei's research budget grew by 149% over 2014, while Amazon's budget grew by 210% over the same period.
In fact, Huawei was the fourth company in terms of research and development last year, ahead only Amazon ($ 28.8 billion), Google parent Alphabet ($ 21.4 billion) and Samsung (16.7 billions of dollars). Apple was seventh on the list after spending $ 14.2 billion in 2018. Looking from another angle, Huawei spent 14% of its revenue on research last year, after 16% of gross expenditure of Alphabet. Samsung's R & D spend in 2018 accounted for 8% of its highest business turnover, compared to Apple's 5%.
Heavy spending on R & D leads to innovations
Some of these figures could explain why Huawei is expected to become the world 's largest smartphone maker next year; Last year, it shipped more than 200 million handsets, placing it third behind Samsung and Apple. Fueled by heavy research spending, the company has had some innovations that other smartphone companies have copied. For example, the Huawei P20 Pro was the first phone to feature a three-camera configuration (which has since been superseded by the five cameras on the back of the Nokia 9 PureView), and the Mate 20 Pro featured a charging feature. Inverted wireless that allowed the phone to be used as a wireless charger. This is something that Samsung has copied for the new Galaxy S10 lineup (PowerShare) and the Apple iPhone 2019 models (perhaps only OLED units) should offer the same functionality. And may not be as important as other smartphone features, when Huawei introduced the degraded finishes for its P20 line last year, other manufacturers have quickly proposed their new models with the same look.
Sometimes, however, trying to be too innovative turns against us. The P30 Pro includes an artificial intelligence feature called Moon Mode, designed to allow users to take a close-up view of the moon using the hybrid zoom capabilities of the P30 Pro. However, a researcher recently alleged that the phone was adding images of previously published Moon photographs to fill in areas that were not visible in the user's snapshot. Which only proves that if a company that spends a lot of money on R & D fires for the moon, it will fail sometimes.
The fact that Huawei plays an important role in creating 5G networks in so many countries is upsetting the US government. The faster data speeds provided by 5G will help stimulate many economies and create new activities and services that we can not even think about right now, including the use of driverless cars. The company denies putting in its business any type of backdoor that could send information to the communist government. And while this may be true, another major concern is that once the 5G is generalized, Huawei could close all these networks under Beijing's leadership.
