Tech war: Huawei founder Ren is betting on the firm’s alternative ecosystems to combat impact of US sanctions

Huawei Technologies founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei commented earlier this year that the Shenzhen-based telecoms giant would face tougher times under US sanctions, pledging to build alternative ecosystems based on the firm’s home-grown operating systems HarmonyOS and EulerOS by opening them up to partners.

“Huawei will face tougher days under US sanctions and crackdowns, but Huawei will also be more prosperous,” Ren said in a July conversation with Liu Yadong, head of the Journalism School at Nankai University, and former editor-in-chief of the state newspaper Science and Technology Daily.

The transcript of the conversation was published on Liu’s personal WeChat blog on Thursday and widely cited by Chinese media.

After Huawei was added to a US blacklist in 2019, cutting off its access to advanced US-origin technology, the firm has been developing its own hardware and software alternatives, including HarmonyOS, a mobile and Internet-of-Things operating system, and EulerOS, a Linux distribution designed for enterprise servers.

Huawei will continue to “invest tens of thousands of manpower and billions of capital each year” in developing HarmonyOS and EulerOS, even though the codes for the two operating systems are open source, Ren said.

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In China, over 30 operating systems are based on HarmonyOS, covering smartphones, tablets and other industry devices with 600 million users, according to Ren.

The software development has engaged various industry partners, who will also migrate to Huawei’s cloud service, which will help expand the company’s own ecosystem, Ren said.

Even though the US sanctions have been a challenge, Ren said that Huawei and China should also learn from the US, especially when it comes to supporting basic research and grooming talent.

“We should still learn from advanced American culture. We never said we wanted to ‘beat down the US’,” Ren said. “America has a lot of ‘soil’ to attract talent, and China should have the same for high-level talent.”

Huawei has been reticent on details behind the Kirin chip that powers the smartphone, but the processor – which according to a TechInsights teardown commissioned by Bloomberg uses a 7-nanometre process from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp – has fuelled speculation that China can circumvent US sanctions.

HarmonyOS and EulerOS have also been boosted by the government of Shenzhen, which is making a concerted push to boost use of the operating systems. The city wants to eliminate reliance on foreign tech in key operating systems by 2025, and help HarmonyOS and EulerOS become world-leading software, according to the plan announced in July.

South China Morning Post