Huawei’s Guo Ping: a 1.4bn-person market sustains us, supply chain should learn from Apple, AI must become Nvidia

Fast Technology reports that Huawei’s internal “Heart Voice” community recently published the full minutes of a discussion between board supervisor Guo Ping and new employees. Across nearly 10,000 words, Guo gave plain-spoken replies on artificial intelligence, large-model strategy and 6G. Asked whether Huawei phone sales could one day surpass Apple, Guo said Huawei never sets surpassing any one company as a goal, focusing only on its own products and services.

He admitted candidly that in supply-chain management Huawei still has much to learn from Apple, especially the resilience and risk resistance of Apple’s supplier system, which remains a gap to close. Huawei and its suppliers are interdependent partners; when business peaks, Huawei should heed partners’ reasonable needs, so that in a downturn they reciprocate and help it through.

Guo argued that the real long-term constraint on Huawei is never external restrictions, but whether internal capability keeps pace with the industry. China’s market of 1.4bn people and its demand is enough to sustain Huawei’s healthy survival, though its horizons reach well beyond the domestic market. The risk to guard against is not outside competition but whether Huawei can field differentiated, value-creating products against the world’s best peers.

On ICT and compute, Guo was explicit: Huawei’s goal in that arena is to become Nvidia. Its core strength is not building a leading self-developed large model, but giving every customer a powerful compute base on which to build good models, ensuring any model in the world runs efficiently on Huawei’s Ascend, Kunpeng, supernodes and clusters. His closing word on strategy was two characters: focus. All resources go into connection and computation, with no plan to expand into new business lines.

Observers note Huawei has moved past the era of slogans and head-to-head labelling, returning to the most basic logic of enterprise management, no reckless expansion, no overreach, just pushing its two best things to the top of the industry.

Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Sohu IT report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.sohu.com/a/1077010329_163726.