Can Huawei say goodbye to the "Black Widow" type of growth

Editor's note: Huawei is moving from the traditional carrier market to the corporate market, but the process is relatively painful. Huawei needs to make the deepest break with traditional thinking and mode of action.

At first, Xu, the CEO of Huawei's business operations center, did not really understand the true meaning of the "Black Widow" speech made by President Ren, until the end of 2011, when Huawei's business was in trouble, and President Ren, after his retreat, made his point.

"Black Widow" is a poisonous spider that females eat males after mating. In 2010, Ren asked Huawei not to be a "black Widow", to open up, to co-operate, to achieve a total win, to leave the difficulties to themselves, and to give more benefits to others.

Huawei's business will assume greater responsibility for future development

"Those of us who have been in the market for many years do not really deal with business at all and do not understand what it means to be open and to win." "Xu in an interview this August, said," (in) the operator market, we are a direct marketing model, customers around the world only hundreds of, adhere to customer-centric, good service, will be successful. So we turned to business, faced with tens of thousands of customers, everyone in addition to excitement, the operator and the difference between the business market is not aware of. ”

Xu's goal is a remarkable ambition. According to the plan, Huawei's business sales are expected to reach $7 billion trillion in 2012, reaching $15 billion trillion within 3-5 years. In terms of business, Cisco, one of the industry's giants, is selling $48.6 billion trillion in fiscal 2013, while another important company juniper a revenue of $4.365 billion in 2012.

"Huawei's business has a prominent feature of the product line is very long, even if Cisco does expand, its main core revenue still from the routing and switch, Huawei includes hardware to ICT (information, communication and technology) of various products." This advantage is to be able to quickly set up a solution for the user, for customers it does not matter how many vendors behind the solution, so this is the advantage, but also is a disadvantage, talk about the customer back to see their products have all, an impulse is easy to single-handedly. "Business compared to the number of operators, the difference between the industry is large, alone can not deal with this situation," said Guangdong Health, the global customer director of Intel Corporation. ”

The Xu team suffered a considerable amount of pain in the first year as they migrated from the service carrier market to the business market. "You know Huawei has a saying that people who can hear the sound of guns make decisions, so in the first year, in many cases, salespeople take back the list and demand it from the research and development department. "Huawei Business Marketing and Solutions department President Zhangshunmao recalls the business development process, in a tongue-in-cheek tone, it's" dark Time "," the Research and development department can only desperately meet demand, but each industry has its own industry specificity, like some customers do intelligent transportation, they provide traffic forecast, It's like the weather forecast. This is a complete amateur for Huawei's research and development, but it is also a product. ”

The end result of the "spot" is that Huawei's research and development power is greatly dispersed, and research and development products cannot be replicated, and the efficiency of research and development is low, "the most important thing is that both partners and customers are dissatisfied, which makes us realize that there are big problems." "Zhangshunmao said. In the year, many of the high-end talent that Huawei has previously recruited from industry leaders such as Cisco and IBM have opted to run again because of the incompatibility of Huawei's culture. Huawei's business is at a low ebb.

At the end of 2011, Huawei's top decision-making team, EMT, held a retreat for business, and Ren spoke at the meeting, specifying the strategic direction of business adherence to "being integrated", and finally becoming Huawei's 2012-year 1th article. Enterprise Business "Integrated" strategy is ren on the previous "Huawei no longer do ' Black Widow ' speech," the specific interpretation, from this time, including Xu Huawei Enterprise business management team really cut the carrier market blood, to find the direction of business development.

"' Being integrated ' as a strategic positioning, is actually defining who we are, and we're positioning ourselves as an ICT infrastructure provider, and we're clearly defining our own boundaries, not crossing borders and generating competition from partners in the business arena. Another layer of meaning is that Huawei abandoned the original from research and development, sales to service one-stop mode, in the customer interface, by partners contract and services. "Zhangshunmao said.

Once the direction is found, Huawei used to serve the customer's patience to use to unite partners, the effect immediately highlighted. "This May, I was very impressed, Mao Total (Zhangshunmao) to Beijing, directly to me, no leadership, see enterprises." Electricity, transportation, energy, he one to understand. "This is different from the impression of the big company leadership of the pie, so that China Intelligent Transportation (Holdings) Co., Ltd. President Jiang Hailin impressed." And Huawei will be at any time with third-party agencies to carry out partner satisfaction survey, for each problem in the survey questionnaire, there are direct leaders, 3 months will be the progress of the problem assessment.

"Our company's specific difficulties are the industry's implementation period is relatively long, there will be receivables in the capital turnover problem, Huawei initiative to do the seller's credit, to find the bank to help us solve the problem of cash flow." Companies such as Huawei may have had such a collaborative approach with carriers, but they haven't done it with companies. Jiang Hailin said that Huawei has provided important support to its partners.

This is also an additional policy for Huawei to channel and partner. "Because of the changes in technology and business models, it is becoming more and more difficult for many partners to survive, such as resellers, and we will help such partners to transform their business, mainly through Huawei's joint third party finance company providing credit support to partners, such as Citic Insurance." Lin, president of the Global Channel division of Huawei Business.

Faced with the industry's mature channel agents have been Cisco and other pioneers of the situation, Xu not afraid, he believes that these channels and partners to think about the problem will be the way to consider growth and trends. "A few years later, Huawei is bound to be one of the winners, so Huawei is already gathering a group of core partners." ”

The ups and downs of Huawei's business experience have discounted revenue forecasts. Now that the Xu team has revised its revenue targets, Xu said, business will grow 40% this year to $2.7 billion trillion, and 5 years from 2017 is expected to reach $10 billion trillion.

At that retreat, Ren made another remark that "children also have to pay taxes". "Children" for the enterprise business BG, consumer business BG.

His clear expectations of performance represent the maturity of two new business units. As the market for the carrier, which occupies nearly 75% per cent of Huawei, becomes saturated, corporate and consumer businesses will assume greater responsibility, especially in terms of growing space (according to data, In the next few years the global enterprise business market size will reach 1.4 trillion U.S. dollars, the operator business of 150 billion U.S. dollars, consumer business for 270 billion U.S. dollars, is considered to be Huawei's most important business business will play a greater role, so Huawei's business to achieve profitability will be of great significance.

In the past two years, with the combination of communication technology and information technology, communication industry, information industry and even a wider range of IT industry are changing dramatically. HP, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle ... All the other IT giants that had nurtured the warm riverbed of the Silicon Valley of the late 70 and the same time were in anxiety, some shine names had been erased, and the rest struggled in the throes of transformation. If Huawei can be seen as a specimen of initial success, as Xu said, it is necessary to change from the original thinking, from the deepest veins of the body to do the deepest break. Nokia, which has just been bought by Microsoft, for example, has been aware of the industry's direction long before Apple, so it has a huge 8 billion dollar acquisition map company, and Nokia has already made a touchscreen phone. But in the end, Nokia is still failing, and in the final analysis, its changes are still in the past, rather than being transformed from a paper company to a communications company.

Of course, Huawei's business as a "success" is premature, compared with IBM and other companies, Huawei still has a lot of weaknesses, one of Cisco executives bluntly said: some of Huawei's weaknesses is also clear, Cisco will be in the solution and innovation in the final defeat Huawei.

It is clear that Huawei and Cisco have long been in the war, but Huawei's business is clearly on the right track.