Huawei Photo: VCG

 
Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies is ramping up its digital transformation to stay ahead of current tech trends, with various digital products and strategies being announced this week. 

The company's push to bolster its digital capabilities and resilience comes amid recent media reports suggesting the company might face more crackdown measures in Europe and the US.

At the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023 in Shanghai from Wednesday to Thursday, Huawei announced key strategies for investment in foundational technologies to deepen its involvement in the financial industry. Two innovative solutions - Financial Container Cloud and Cloud Native GaussDB - were also revealed at the summit.

In a speech at the summit on Wednesday, Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's rotating chairwoman, said that digitalization and smartization are the new driving forces for economic development, and everything is becoming perceivable, interconnected, and intelligent, the Securities Times reported. 

In this process, the financial industry will also be reshaped, and generative artificial intelligence, cloud native, Internet of Things, blockchain, 5G/5.5G, and other technologies will affect the future of finance, she said.

Meng said in the speech that Huawei will continue to invest in root technology research to continuously improve product resilience, and realize high performance, high reliability, and high security in its cloud network. While leading in technology, Huawei will deepen its innovation in financial scenarios, she said. 

Despite the crackdown by the US government and some of its allies, Huawei has been continuously investing in its research and development (R&D). In 2022, the company's R&D spending hit a record of 161.5 billion yuan ($22.7 billion), accounting for 25.1 percent of the company's full-year revenue. Over the past decade, the company has spent more than 977.3 billion yuan in R&D, according to media reports. 

While Huawei has shown great resilience in the face of unfair foreign crackdowns, the company could face more crackdown measures, according to some media reports. 

On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that the EU was considering a mandatory ban on using firms that might pose a security risk in their 5G networks, including Huawei. 

In April, nine US Republican senators urged the US government to impose sanctions on Huawei Cloud and other Chinese cloud service providers. 

In response to the report, Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on April 26 that "we oppose overstretching the concept of national security and unjustifiably suppressing Chinese companies. To deliberately block the normal trade and economic exchanges between China and the US will find no support and will eventually undermine the interests of US consumers."

Global Times