Huawei Starts A New Business: Entering The "Shura Field" Of Car Building

In the past week, Huawei's automatic driving test video has been swiped on the network, which is a phased achievement demonstration of Huawei's automobile business.

"I don't feel like doing it every day. Every version is improving. In 2019, I watched the road test video of our cooperation with international automobile companies for the first time. After two years of polishing, the experience is getting better and better. " In an interview with Shanghai Auto Show recently, Wang Jun, President of Huawei's intelligent vehicle solution Bu, said.

This international car company is Audi. Huawei and Audi have also cooperated for a long time in the field of automatic driving. However, in recent domestic landing practice, Huawei took the lead in holding hands with BAIC. In the past 2-3 years, Huawei's acceleration in the automotive field can be clearly felt.

At the same time, praise and controversy come together. There are views in the industry that Huawei's automatic driving technology has something to be worth mentioning, while others say that it is not mature enough. However, it is difficult to judge more indicators with only one video. What is more important than the current technical disputes and route selection is who can popularize faster and who can go further in the automobile circle.

Wang Jun repeatedly stressed: "Huawei's intelligent vehicle solution Bu is not only about automatic driving technology, but also one aspect. This business is both 2B and 2C. On the one hand, we are timid when we enter the automobile industry. The automobile industry has very high requirements for safety, reliability, durability and comfort. On the other hand, we are also entering the 2C brand. "

Since the formal establishment of auto Bu in 2019, Huawei has been repeating its positioning: to be a component supplier, to be a tier 1 and tier 2 supplier, and to cooperate with auto companies rather than compete.

Zhong Shi, a senior analyst in the automotive industry, told 21st century economic report: "in the past, the cooperation between Huawei and many automobile enterprises was basically based on the host plant supplier model. When the automobile is developing towards intelligent network connected electric, Huawei's strong technical resources can take the opportunity to" invade "the automobile industry. Automobile enterprises welcome cooperation with technology enterprises, and most of them prefer Huawei as a pure technology supplier. The premise of continuing cooperation is that Huawei does not directly build cars, otherwise it will create a new competitor of rival type. "

In his opinion, when Huawei will directly enter the automobile manufacturing industry is still a mystery. However, it has begun to try to enter the upstream and downstream sectors of the automobile profit chain and cooperate with automobile enterprises. Huawei itself can also accumulate market big data.

Wang Jun's answer is very direct: "at present, we really don't consider (making cars). If the parts business is good enough, why build cars? Making cars doesn't necessarily make money. "

Behind the words, we can first feel that Huawei is a company with cost thinking. From a series of actions, Huawei focuses more on promoting products than on big strategies, and pays attention to commercial returns; Second, in the process of entering the new industry, Huawei has acted quickly and has a strong ability to arrange troops. Although the chip and terminal businesses have been hit, we can still feel that the business of all lines is in order, and the internal business transfer and integration are in a certain degree. For Huawei, this is also a dangerous move that has to be taken under the current complex situation. In the view of some insiders, this is an opportunity for Huawei's terminal and automobile business to regenerate. In the view of the outside world, this is also a re entrepreneurship of Huawei.

Auto Bu: Huawei's third eye

Within Huawei, automotive research and technology reserves have been started in 2012. At the beginning, the team name was Internet of vehicles, led by Xu Zhijun, chairman of Huawei in turn.

Wang Jun recalled: "in 2017 and 2018, our Bu had not yet been established. At that time, chairman Xu considered what Huawei could bring to the end-users and how to cooperate with automobile enterprises, hoping to create a new business model, because he decided not to build cars at that time. At that time, we found some car companies for discussion. Finally, some car companies agreed to adopt Huawei's inside model with Huawei. The essence is to jointly design and develop vehicles from the point of vehicle definition. At that time, we didn't consider whether there was brand sales. "

Until 2019, Huawei's automotive team really surfaced. On May 29 of that year, Huawei officially established the intelligent vehicle solution Bu to implement the strategy for intelligent connected vehicles. The auto business, which has been deployed for many years, has finally been upgraded to the first level department status, juxtaposed with the three BGS. At that time, Huawei moved the automobile Bu to the group, which was subordinate to ICT organization, and ranked in the same position as BG. The importance of automobile business can be seen.

In 2020, automobile Bu and consumer BG will be integrated. Specifically, Huawei adjusted the business jurisdiction of the intelligent vehicle solution Bu from the ICT business management committee to the consumer business management committee, and appointed Wang Tao as a member of the consumer business management committee. At the same time, BG IRB (institutional review board) was reorganized as the IRB of intelligent terminal and intelligent car parts, the investment decision-making and portfolio management of intelligent car parts business were adjusted from ICT IRB to intelligent terminal and intelligent car parts IRB, and Yu Chengdong was appointed as the director of intelligent terminal and intelligent car parts IRB.

By 2021, on the one hand, the automotive Bu will show more software and hardware capabilities to the outside world, with the support of many teams behind it. Su Jing, President of the intelligent driving product line of Huawei's intelligent vehicle solution Bu ads, said in a recent interview with an intermediary: "there are more than 2000 people in the automatic driving area and about 1200 people in the pure algorithm. The algorithm can be divided into several parts. The first is big perception, including vision and laser. The second prediction is PNC, The size of each team is about 200-300 people. "

Within Huawei, capability reuse can be carried out at the level of basic R & D. before the establishment of automobile Bu, there were R & D departments such as deep learning, visual processor, battery, motor and electronic control. Taking the self-developed AI chip used by Huawei MDC as an example, some Huawei insiders told the 21st century economic report that the relevant R & D departments have started to design the AI chip for automobiles since 2018, and have carried out research and development according to the vehicle specifications.

On the other hand, car Bu and consumer business are also cooperating. Wang Jun said: "we have very close cooperation with consumer BG. For example, we are doing scene applications. The foundation of intelligent cockpit is harmonyos. On this basis, we have increased some capabilities in vehicle and machine, and become the harmonyos of vehicle and machine. In addition, we also have cooperation in other aspects such as the construction of voice semantic ability

On April 20, Yu Chengdong, the helmsman of Huawei's consumer business, announced that Huawei's smart election officially launched the sale of Cyrus sF5, which will enter Huawei's stores and flagship stores. The cooperation between Huawei and Xiaokang group is supported by both sales channels and design level.

For Huawei, the current industry is mainly network connected pipeline business and terminal business, which are Huawei's two pillars. In recent years, Huawei has opened up a new track, and automobile is the third eye to look for.

Under the pressure of the United States and fierce competition, the ceiling of communication business has long been visible. Mobile phone business has been stuck, glory has been sold, and the core business is facing uncertainty. Automobile can be regarded as a new growth point for Huawei. Moreover, in terms of automobile technology, no country is in a monopoly position. The United States, Europe, Japan and other regions have their own strengths. In the long run, Huawei's layout of automobiles has few restrictions, and there are also opportunities for independent research and development.

On the other hand, the car, a large mobile terminal, contains great opportunities for change. Although the growth rate of automobile sales slowed down, the incremental market of automotive electronic parts was expanding, especially the development of new energy vehicles and automatic driving, which led to the reshuffle of suppliers.

Who are the competitors?

In the application scenarios of ICT and artificial intelligence, the car is a large terminal among many tentacles. In the process of automobile networking and running for automatic driving, the key is obviously "automatic". Companies such as Google, bat and Huawei have already stored a lot of intelligent technologies, and their cross-border cost is lower than that of traditional cars directly crossing the border to the new species of automatic driving. Therefore, science and technology enterprises have left the auto industry, whether or not they directly build cars, the current situation can be called "Shura field.".

There are three typical types of enterprises: first, new car manufacturers, Tesla, Weilai, ideal, Xiaopeng, and new brands of traditional cars; Second, pure Internet companies, including Google, bat, Didi, etc; Third, hardware innovators like Huawei and Xiaomi.

Among them, Huawei's statement is to be a partner and supplier of automobile enterprises, and does not exclude brands. But around hardware and software products, the competition and cooperation relationship Huawei is facing has become more complex, while the automobile industry chain itself is relatively stable and closely cooperated, with each occupying its own place. Huawei, which has just entered, is facing fierce competition.

Since Huawei announced its auto business, many people in the automotive industry believe that Bosch is the most direct competitor. In fact, Bosch is not the only one in terms of competition, because Huawei's automotive product line involves chips, modules, operating systems, tri electric systems, intelligent cockpit, computing platform, automatic driving assistance system, etc.

From the perspective of hardware enterprises, the competition of computing platforms is fierce. Huawei's latest MDC has two versions, 400tops and 800tops. The company has launched special communication modules for automobiles, on-board networking solutions, snapdragon digital cockpit products, and the latest snapdragon ride automatic driving solution. According to the combination of Qualcomm SOC and AI acceleration chips, it can achieve the computing power of 10-700 tops.

NVIDIA provides computing solutions. On April 12, NVIDIA announced the launch of NVIDIA drive Atlan, the next generation AI computing platform for autonomous vehicles. With the latest GPU architecture, new ARM CPU core, deep learning and computer vision accelerator, NVIDIA will perform 1000 trillion operations per second (1000 tops). In January this year, NVIDIA founder Huang Renxun said in a video conference: "by 2030, I think it is possible that 20% of the cars will achieve advanced automatic driving, and most of them will adopt NVIDIA technology."

Mobileye, a subsidiary of Intel, has been deeply involved in the field of assisted driving. Recently, it has been announced that its autonomous driving system Mobileye drive has been commercially available, driven by Mobileye Q system integration chip and software and hardware solutions, reaching L4 level. In addition, horizon, Xinchi technology, black sesame and other domestic start-up chip enterprises have also successively launched high-performance products.

Software companies are basically competing for the "Android system" of cars. For example, Baidu's Apollo project is an open source platform for Baidu's automatic driving software, which can help users quickly build an automatic driving system by combining vehicles and hardware systems. Huawei's "octopus" platform is also to help auto enterprises build the development ability of automatic driving based on zero foundation, and reduce the development threshold. In addition to Baidu, there are a number of domestic start-ups, such as Xiaoma Zhixing, Wenyuan Zhixing, autox, etc., which are all aiming at L4 and L5 solutions.

(Editor: Zhang Weixian)

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