Huawei announces counter-intuitive recruitment drive

At its latest annual analyst summit, Chinese vendor Huawei once more struck a defiant note with the announcement of a new recruitment programme.

The last thing you’d expect a company that has had around half of its business destroyed by US sanctions to prioritize is taking on more staff. A possible explanation for this counter-intuitive move is Huawei’s remarkable ability to increase profits in the face of exceptional headwinds. Afterall, it has to spend all that cash somewhere.

“At Huawei, when we talk about innovation, the first thing we think is people,” said Ken Hu, Huawei’s Rotating Chairman (pictured). “We don’t care where you’re from, where you graduated, or what you studied,” he continued. “As long as you have a dream for the future and believe you can make it happen, we want you to come and join us. We provide world-class challenges, a powerful platform, and all the resources you need to explore the unknown.”

Huawei certainly does face ‘world-class challenges’, but we suspect Hu was referring more to technological than geopolitical ones. “We are currently focusing on three areas: strengthening our approach to innovation, equipping all industries with the tools and knowledge they need to go digital, and helping build a low-carbon world,” he clarified.

The summit was broadcast live via the Huawei website but we were unable to attend. However, Light Reading was lucky enough to catch at least some of the stream-athon and reported on some of Hu’s less bullish statements. Essentially he conceded the point that things aren’t going to get any easier for Huawei over the next year, but maintained the defiant stance expressed at Mobile World Congress a couple of months ago.

Attendees with the greatest stamina were rewarded with a presentation of the findings of Huawei’s Intelligent World 2030 report. This seems to be a utopian affair that aims to anticipate all the cool stuff we’ll be up to by the end of this decade. It’s apparently the culmination of three years of research and consists of four distinct sections, so you definitely want to be sitting comfortably before you get stuck into it.

“Industries are the foundation of the intelligent world,” said Gavin Gai, President of Huawei ICT Strategy & Business Development. “The Communications Network 2030, Computing 2030, Digital Power 2030, and Intelligent Automotive Solution 2030 reports provide insights into the technology trends of these respective industries, and can serve as a reference for industry development in the future.”

“It is our relentless pursuit of a superior experience that drives innovation and evolution in communications networks. We are about to witness the change from tens of billions of connections between people to hundreds of billions of connections between things.”

Ultimately events and announcements such as these from Huawei serve to emphasise the narrative that it remains business as usual, for all America’s attempts to throw a spanner in the works. Huawei is clearly not going away and, as a national business champion, it would be inconceivable for the Chinese state to grant the US such a victory. We’ll leave it to the job market to decide how attractive an employer Huawei is, under such circumstances.

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