Huawei Yunhong Fangming： A small step for enterprises to go to the cloud, a major leap for industrial clusters

2021 is the first year of the "14th Five-Year Plan". Facing the topic of "adhering to innovation-driven development, accelerating the construction of a new development pattern of a modern industrial system, improving the quality of economic development, and maintaining sustainable and healthy economic development", how can new infrastructure service providers represented by cloud computing better play the role of technology platforms, empower industrial economic innovation, and promote regional sustainable development? How to improve enterprise efficiency, promote regional enterprise cooperation, and consolidate the elements of enterprise development and innovation? Hong Fangming, president of Huawei Cloud China, expressed his views on the above issues in an interview with China Business News.

From a manufacturing power to a "smart" manufacturing power

After a year of unparalleled changes in a century, how enterprises can cope with difficulties and how to transform and upgrade has become an urgent proposition to be solved. The state has launched new infrastructure, and enterprises have accelerated their digital transformation. In the past year, we have seen a phenomenon. Those companies that can actively embrace digitalization and actively invest in online have shown a good development trend as a whole. On the contrary, those companies that use traditional methods and do not change the offline model, whether in sales or supply chain, are facing huge challenges as a whole. As people say, the SARS epidemic in 2003 accelerated the development of the consumer Internet, and the sudden COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 will accelerate the process of enterprises going to the cloud.

Today, our country is transforming from a manufacturing power to a "smart" manufacturing power. Enterprises need to transform and upgrade through digital means and digital empowerment in all aspects, such as research and development, production and manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, and service. This is also the key to how to change the current situation and how to take the next step under the current economic development situation. By visiting more than 30 provinces and cities across the country in 2020, we found that the technology gathered on the cloud is bringing great changes to the industry and society.

Urban industrial clusters need to move from small, scattered, and low-energy to high, refined, and cutting-edge

The development stage and state of a local industrial cluster determine the active level of a region’s economic development, and also reflect the situation of people’s livelihood and employment. It can be said that the regional industrial cluster determines the development, people’s livelihood and employment of a region, which is a very important development indicator.

In a conference held by Huawei Cloud in early January 2020, the director of the Bureau of Industry and Information Technology of a certain place said that although the local area has been ranked among the top 100 industrial zones in the country, the internal and external challenges in the past year have made him deeply feel the difficulties of the entire manufacturing industry: the cost of factory labor and land has been rising, the export situation has changed, the industrial structure is in urgent need of reorganization, and entrepreneurs have also expressed their urgent desire for transformation and upgrading.

Due to the limitations of formation conditions, industrial clusters in our country mostly focus on traditional processing fields, developing in the form of small workshops, and lack scientific and technological innovation. At present, traditional industrial clusters are facing challenges such as increasing labor costs, increasing social costs, and shortage of talents. Relying on simple replication for scale expansion, the form of spreading big cakes cannot achieve sustainable development. Industrial clusters need to move from small, scattered, and low-energy to high, refined, and cutting-edge development. How to complement R & D, market, supply chain, and service capabilities, realize supply chain elongation, and integrate upstream and downstream supply chains to obtain higher profits is the core appeal of industrial cluster development.

It is undeniable that there are many excellent enterprises in our industrial clusters that are doing very well and have reached a very top position in the world, but there are still a considerable number of small and medium-sized enterprises that have not reached this level. To evaluate the active level of an economy, it is not to have a few large enterprises, but more importantly to look at the activity of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises. It is a key response for the country to solve employment and improve the overall economic active level. And the cloud platform that brings together various technologies and ecosystems just provides the technical business means needed for change.

Moving from simple connections to deeply empowering

Huawei has amassed a wealth of experience in the field of electronic information manufacturing over the past 30 years, whether it is from supply chain research and development, marketing, service, or in the industry precipitation of technology and marketing capabilities, Huawei hopes to use the cloud to bring its accumulated experience to empower various industries, empower society, and realize the company’s vision of bringing the digital world into everyone, every family, and every organization to build a smart world connected to all things.

In the process of business expansion, Huawei Cloud has learned about the characteristics of China’s economy itself and the characteristics of industrial clusters, and put forward the concept of "industrial cloud". Based on cloud infrastructure, an urban industry empowering platform that integrates industrial ecological resources to provide technologies, solutions, and industrial practice services provides a core driving force for promoting the integration of urban production and number, industrial innovation and upgrading, and reshaping the new industrial pattern. In essence, the demand for informatization and digitalization in today’s economic development has given birth to the concept and model of industrial cloud. At the same time, industrial cloud also responds to the question of where and how to transform and upgrade the industry in the process of supply, marketing, and service.

Different from the industrial Internet, which focuses on connecting various data and production materials of enterprises, so as to provide enterprises with the kinetic energy for transformation and upgrading; in addition to the connection function, the industrial cloud also provides enterprises with industrial empowerment and rich offline services, including the best experience of the industry, while combining a variety of advanced technical means.

Manufacturing cannot be simply defined by the production process. R & D and sales are actually key links in serving the manufacturing industry. Only with an enterprise system that completes research, sales, supply, production, and service can it be a true modern manufacturing industry. However, born out of domestic manufacturing enterprises such as processing with incoming materials, it is urgent to transform to modern manufacturing. Take the United States as an example. The proportion of manufacturing in the United States is relatively low, but if you look at the entire GDP of the United States, you will find that a very large part of the industry serves the manufacturing industry. This kind of manufacturing service industry accounts for about 50% of the overall manufacturing industry. If our country wants to move from a manufacturing power to a smart manufacturing power, it must work hard on this. In the face of the unclear concept of China’s industrial upgrading, the current situation of "hard" and "soft" is not simply to provide a cold technology to solve, but also to empower, to have a team to serve the industry, to teach these original traditional manufacturing industries how to achieve the next jump.

Huawei’s own industry is relatively wide, from the original service to operators, to government and enterprises, and then to consumer BG, you can think of Huawei as a traditional manufacturing industry, a high-tech enterprise, and a retail enterprise. Therefore, Huawei Cloud has rich accumulation in the above fields, including technology, marketing, supply chain, service and other aspects. Huawei Cloud will export these capabilities through the form of industrial cloud to empower the industry, which is also the biggest value point and difference point of Huawei Cloud.

A small step for enterprises to go to the cloud, a major leap for industrial clusters

At present, Huawei Cloud has landed in more than 120 innovation centers and industrial cluster bases across the country, and has joined more than 300 partners including MES, CAD, supply chain management, production management, software suppliers, etc., to provide digital transformation services for 17,000 enterprises.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, an electronic information enterprise in Dongguan, based on Huawei Cloud Industrial Internet, the big data platform created by the platform FusionPlant helped it to achieve an orderly resumption of work and production, ensuring the occurrence of 0 epidemic cases. At the same time, the efficient and convenient management brought by the visualization of the big data platform has also solved the remote control problem that many foreign employees cannot resume work in many process production links, and manages the production quality control of the entire production line. This is what we think is a very typical use case of an enterprise.

Facing the characteristics of China’s industrial economy and the key nodes facing the industry, how can its next jump be realized? For each industry, where is the future going and where is the next jump? This is the most concerned issue in the upstream and downstream industrial chains of urban industrial clusters.

The automotive industry, ICT industry, medical apparatus and pharmaceutical industry are the three pillar industries of the global economy. In the automotive industry, Huawei Car BU proposes to help car companies "build and sell good cars", use its own capabilities in research and development, manufacturing, marketing, etc., to drive the development of the upstream and downstream industrial chain of intelligent networked vehicles, and do some exploration and innovation work around automobile companies to help car companies transform and upgrade from the traditional fuel vehicle industry to the electric vehicle industry; in the electronic information industry, which is facing the pressure from low-end to high-end, Huawei helps the electronic information industry to achieve the next leap through its own practice; in the materials and pharmaceutical industries, many studies currently rely on a lot of laboratory experimental work, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Huawei Cloud makes use of its vast computing and IOT capabilities, combined with previous research and development achievements, to enhance the entire process of drug and material research and development.

With the industrial cloud empowering transformation and upgrading, through the continuous progress of technology, the continuous development of industry, and the continuous improvement of partner capabilities, we will provide the kinetic energy for the industry to upgrade and leap, and consolidate the "black land" of the intelligent world. We must embrace talents and continue to move forward, drive Chinese enterprises to take a small step in the cloud, lead industrial upgrading, and realize a big step in the leap of China’s industrial clusters, and truly realize a leap in the industry!