Huawei's rotating chairman Ken Hu speaks to global media
Joseph Waring, Mobile World Live: Sorry for the difficulty. Given the allegations and the fear that's being pushed across many governments, what specific actions does Huawei plan to take in the near term or the medium term to alleviate some of that pressure? I know you have your cyber security center in the UK working with the operators there and a number of other similar facilities. Can you talk about that?
Ken: We realize that the industry we're in is undergoing faster technological transition periods. Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated. Networks are becoming more open. As a result of this, we definitely notice the increasing interest and care from network operators and regulators and also the general public about the industry. We think this is just normal.
When we look at ourselves, as I mentioned just now, Huawei's business has been growing very fast. Our revenue will exceed 100 billion dollars very soon. We're doing business in 170 countries in the world. About half of the Fortune 500 companies are using Huawei products. The majority of the top telecom operators have deployed Huawei's equipment. Our smartphones are being used by hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide.
Given our scale, our size, and our presence, we definitely need to take it very seriously when we look at the concerns or interests expressed by governments, by society, and by the general public.
In that context, we are keenly aware that it is simply something we must be doing to have proactive, transparent and constructive dialogues and conversations with the governments, with local communities and with our customers.
This is exactly what we have been doing. I can briefly introduce our actions and our plans in this area. Take security, for example. Many people have expressed concerns or interests in this area. For Huawei, we take security as our highest priority and our overarching guideline.
In 2011, this positioning of security as our highest priority and overarching guideline was recognized in the form of a board resolution. That was the open letter released by our founder and CEO, Mr Ren, addressed to the world, showing and demonstrating our serious commitment to security.
Following that positioning and the resolution, we have taken very solid steps and measures internally and externally. For example, internally, cyber security guarantee and protection have been built and implemented across our business operations from corporate governance, organizational structure, technology innovation, staff management, and IT systems as well. I believe Sean Yang in the morning may have introduced some of those to you.
Externally, when we engage with customers, regulators and the general public, we have been following a strategy or approach that we call "make white whiter" over the last ten-plus years.
In other words, we understand the concerns from our customers or regulators. Therefore, we are willing to take additional steps or go the extra mile compared to other peers in our industry.
As part of that effort, we have undergone third-party certification of Huawei's hardware, software and our solutions, which has been done by independent 3rd parties.
If we look at the results of those certifications, we can clearly see over the past 30 years, Huawei and Huawei's equipment has maintained a very solid and correct record in our industry when it comes to cyber security.
We have never had a serious cyber security incident for our equipment.
And also even with the most strict review and screening by regulators or our customers, there has never been any evidence showing our equipment poses a security threat.
According to a most recent report from CFI, a third party, independent auditor, Huawei's equipment from operational stability and operational reliability point of view, has far exceeded industrial average over the past 3 years.
We will be very glad to share this report with you after this interview.
We feel very proud about this recognition from customers and the industry.
But we definitely will not relax requirements we put on ourselves, because we are keenly aware technology will become more and more complex; networks will become more open. Therefore the requirements or demands on security will just be much higher.
Therefore, we will continue to increase our investment on security and security related technologies.
In our most recent board meeting, we decided on a companywide transformation program to improve our software engineering capabilities.
The company will invest an initial special budget of $2 billion in the next five years to comprehensively improve our software engineering capabilities so our products will be better prepared for the future world.
We believe through these efforts, we will be able to continue to maintain our leading position in our industry when it comes to cyber security. We also hope with such efforts we will continue to maintain our solid cyber security track record.
We will continue to step up our efforts in terms of communicating, engaging, and collaborating with governments around the world. We will help governments to understand the track record we have had on cyber security, and we'll also talk with the governments so they also understand the efforts and the actions we have been taking on cyber security.
For example, the internal cyber security lab you visited in the morning, that's also the lab we make successful and open to governments and customers around the world, so through the visit and the dialogues they can understand our positioning and what we have been doing. Moving forward, we will more, let's say, localize some of these efforts.
For example, ten years ago we set up an independent cyber security evaluation center in the UK. As a result of that, we have put in place a long-term and effective collaboration model with the stakeholders in the UK. We're going to continue to work on that moving forward. We also have a similar arrangement in Canada. Those are the efforts we will continue to work on and strengthen.
At the same time, we are and will continue to expand similar engagement with the governments. Last month, I myself was in Bonn, participating in an opening ceremony of a security innovation lab there. This lab is essentially an open platform allowing the German government and also our customers in Germany to conduct testing of Huawei's products around security. Such efforts have won the recognition of the German government.
The next step is to launch our security transparency center in Brussels in Q1 next year. That is also part of our longer term plan as well. We will also build and put in place similar open and transparent security management mechanisms in other parts of the world as needed.
When it comes to security in short, I would say this is an area where we take it very seriously and we pay a lot of attention to it. We have taken a lot of efforts in this area, and we'll continue to do so having dialogue and engagement with governments around the world.
When we look at the concerns from governments of Huawei, I think there's another part of it that we also need to address as well.
Huawei is a company that originated from China, and we are not a public company. But that does not mean we cannot achieve the same level of transparency. We have taken a lot of efforts and measures in this area as well.
Very early on we announced our ownership structure so that people all know that Huawei is a private company that is owned by its employees.
Every year we go through the most strict processes of audit before we launch our annual report, so all stakeholders will know the authenticity, integrity and independence of our business operations.
At the same time, given certain specific concerns, we have been communicating with the governments around the world around the independence of Huawei's operations. The fact that we have never taken any requests from any governments to damage the business or networks of our customers or other countries. As I mentioned earlier, for any concern, the best way is to let the fact speak for itself. The fact is that over the last thirty years, there's been no major cyber security incident; there's been no cyber security threat; and there's been no evidence showing that Huawei is damaging cyber security. And we'll continue to take proactive communication engagement and also open collaboration so more and more people will be able to realize this.
