Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei makes rare appearance at Sichuan University in search for talent

Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies is planning to work closely with domestic universities to boost basic research and draw in fresh talent, founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei said during a visit to Sichuan University.

Ren visited the university on June 5 in southwestern China, where he said that US-sanctioned Huawei is working closely with universities worldwide on basic theoretical research to "overcome its shortcomings", according to a Sichuan University blog post last week.

Huawei hopes to deepen its cooperation with the public university, one of the oldest in China, as it "highly values" the role that talent plays in technological innovation, the 79-year-old entrepreneur said, according to the post.

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He added that the main goal is to contribute to technological breakthroughs in key fields and on critical issues facing the industry.

Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei in an interview in Taiyuan, northern Shanxi province, on February 9, 2021. Photo: Xinhua alt=Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei in an interview in Taiyuan, northern Shanxi province, on February 9, 2021. Photo: Xinhua>

Huawei's quest for talent has long been a top priority for Ren, whose company has been grappling with escalating export restrictions since Washington blacklisted the Shenzhen-based tech giant in 2019. In a speech last July, the founder said that Huawei will "save talent, not US dollars".

In the months following its blacklisting, Ren initiated a recruitment programme called "Top Minds" - later dubbed "Genius Youth" - which gave priority to job applicants who were winners of top research honours or produced research with "tangible and impactful results", according to an advertisement Huawei posted on the microblogging site Weibo at the time.

Ren has been on other university tours, as well, visiting four in three days in July 2020, including Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Two months later he visited China's top two universities in Beijing - Tsinghua University and Peking University - along with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

China needs "pure research that is not driven by" applied science, Ren said in Beijing that September, according to a transcript the company published on its employee forum.

"Basic" or "pure" research focuses on advancing theory instead of pursuing results for a specific goal or product, as is the case with applied science. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for a greater focus on basic research in recent years.

Huawei last year revived its once-dominant smartphone business in China with a new chip design that appeared to thwart US efforts to limit access to advanced semiconductor technology.

The Mate 60 series handsets launched last August were the first 5G smartphones Huawei had shipped in three years. They were also powered by the Kirin 9000s, from the HiSilicon chip design subsidiary, which appeared to be a 7-nanometre-grade chip produced by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

The launch has been celebrated in China with a patriotic fervour that sent Huawei sales soaring, helping it climb back into the top five smartphone brands in the country. It is believed that Huawei still faces significant chip supply restraints, although it launched the Pura 70 series this year with another 7-nm chip.

The company has also been moving quickly to fill domestic enterprises' need for artificial intelligence (AI) chips in a market that cannot easily access Nvidia's most advanced graphics processing units, which are also under US export controls.

A Huawei executive said last week that its latest Ascend 910B AI chip has been found in some tests to be able to beat the Nvidia A100 in efficiency by 20 per cent when training large language models.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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