ZTE In 5G Era: From Factor Driven To Innovation Driven

From the following of 2G era to the leading of 5g era, China's communication industry has experienced a great reversal of the road of technological iteration in the development process of decades.

Since there are many technical standards behind each generation of communication system before, the difficulty of technology research and development is spiraling upward. For equipment manufacturers, the difficulties in selecting technical routes, developing different markets, and constructing supply ecology are also increasing correspondingly.

In this context, each round of technical route iteration, there is a shuffle between equipment manufacturers. Its pattern has also changed from more than ten manufacturers in 2G era to four major equipment manufacturers in 5g era. Among them, ZTE and Huawei from China have continued to expand their market share.

Today's changes and challenges are different from those in the past. Chen Zhiping, vice president of ZTE, said in an interview with the 21st century economic reporter that in the 2g-4g era, ZTE, as a communication solution provider, is more driven by factors to solve the challenge of certainty of technology itself; Entering the 5g era, we are facing the challenges of uncertainty from application, technology integration and business model, which means innovation driven must be the core.

The only way to deal with these problems is to maintain the continuous innovation of the underlying technology. With the deepening exploration of 5g technology application, ZTE has also extended new business direction for the development of its three core businesses, thus building a more systematic growth capability.

Behind more than 30 years of communication iteration

In the past decades, communication equipment manufacturers have been in a fierce competition environment. The core of its competition lies in the research and selection of communication standards and the accumulation of core patent ability.

In addition, in the early stage of each round of technology change, there will be large capital expenditure, which will test the comprehensive strength of equipment manufacturers in terms of research and judgment of technical routes, sustainability of R & D, cost and service management, etc.

Chen Zhiping analyzed to the reporter that in the 2g-4g stage, the communication mainly solves the problem of the connection between people, so for the communication solution providers, it is more through the accumulation of technology to solve the challenges and pressures on the performance and breakthrough of network technology itself“ At this level, we are more from the perspective of product technology to enhance the depth of application and overall competitiveness. "

In the 5g era, besides the previous communication between people, the communication objects began to expand to many aspects, such as the connection between people and things, the connection between objects and so on. The equipment manufacturers who are involved in it are like entering the "no man's land" exploration.

"From a global perspective, from many companies in the past to the few mainstream equipment manufacturers left today, I think this is a choice for enterprises to adapt to the pressure of the changing situation and their own competitiveness under the complex and changeable competitive environment." Chen Zhiping said that as a technology innovation company, ZTE can survive in the survival of the fittest only by continuously increasing the competitiveness of basic products.

In fact, in the 4G era, manufacturers from China have entered the "parallel operation" state. By the 5g era, Chinese communication equipment manufacturers have been in a leading position in the world.

Chen Zhiping told reporters, "we need to build up our own three-dimensional competitiveness with the help of the complex application scenarios and diversified industry needs derived from such a huge market as China, as well as the experience of digital transformation, and realize the landing in the world, so that we can be invincible in the global competition."

"At the same time, in addition to building the competitiveness of ICT products in the past, we should also work with industry partners to explore huge application scenarios, and combine technology and application scenarios to build the overall competitive strength." She added.

Under the increasingly complex global environment changes, companies operating globally will continue to face new challenges. In 2018, ZTE formulated three development goals: recovery period, development period and exceeding period.

Chen Zhiping said that the company has successfully completed the phased goal of the recovery period. 2021 is the last year of ZTE's development period, and the goal during this period is to "consolidate the foundation and expand the new".

"Fixed capital" refers to keeping the traditional three main businesses in good development trend. The core of the company's thinking of "innovation" is 5g industry application, enterprise digitization and automotive electronics“ To lay out and expand these new development directions in advance in this period of time will help to provide us with a better development accumulation in the exceeding period and lay a good foundation for us to enter the world's top 500 in the future. " She explained.

5g era opens new market

It is precisely because the boundaries of objects and scenes that need to be connected in the 5g era have been greatly expanded, which also means that the new development direction needs to be continuously extended for the participants of the communication industry.

In the past development process, ZTE's operator business has accounted for a relatively large proportion of its contribution. However, in the new era of Internet of things, the development prospect of its government enterprise and consumer business is rapidly releasing.

This can be seen from the company's financial report. In 2020, the government enterprise business will become the fastest growing part of the company's three major businesses, which is also the market direction ZTE is striving to explore.

Chen Zhiping told reporters that in 2021, ZTE's core business term is "government and enterprise", which has been promoted to a strategic level by the company.

"This year is the first year of the 14th five year plan. New infrastructure and enterprise digitization are accelerating. This is an area with great growth space; At the same time, the government enterprise business is also the fastest growing market of ZTE in the past two years. In 2020, the growth rate of domestic government and enterprise business income of the company will exceed 30%. " She said.

In the business products of government and enterprise, the better breakthrough comes from the reserve of ZTE's relative low-level technical capability. Chen Zhiping said that goldendb database is a distributed database solution built by ZTE for 20 years, and it is the only product that has passed 50 test projects organized by the Ministry of industry and information technology“ After 18 years of independent research and development, the "new fulcrum" operating system is a research and innovation based on open source Linux system.

"We have not only made comprehensive application based on communication system, but also applied this set of operating system to power, transportation, automobile, energy and other industries, with more than 200 million applications in 2019." She said.

Based on this, Chen Zhiping shared that ZTE also summed up the enlightenment for future business development: the investment in high-tech threshold is the fundamental to ensure that product innovation can achieve industry-leading; The basic research and development of products should have ingenuity and patience, which are the basic elements to ensure the continuous improvement of competitiveness; To focus on customers, goldendb, operating system and other products are more deeply integrated with the needs of industry customers, and then transform technology into tactics; Ecology is also very important. In order to realize large-scale commercialization of technological innovation at the bottom, it must be endowed or widely used by upstream and downstream industrial partners, so that technology can finally be transformed into product value.

However, in the process of business application, the government enterprise business is also easy to face the problems of scene fragmentation and possible trial and error costs. In this regard, Chen Zhiping introduced that it is necessary to build a capability that can quickly face complex and changeable application scenarios, and then match various requirements in connection, computing power, service integration and application form.

"ZTE put forward the concept of" precision cloud network ", which is to quickly form a flexible and rapid match between the needs of industry applications and our technical capabilities, so that enterprises can deploy more easily, and then reuse them quickly through one point of success." She said that through the use of precision cloud network, we can build a general application model, and extract some common industry modules, similar to building a building block component platform, and then introduce these modules into the application scenarios of other industry partners, which can reduce trial and error costs and deploy quickly.

Chen Zhiping stressed that ZTE is willing to open these atomization capabilities to its partners, so as to jointly realize the rapid iteration of components, and effectively combine the capabilities of the enabling platform and the application innovation ability.

As for the consumer business, which also has strong development potential, the new business is more from the family scene. According to statistics, ZTE's home information terminal delivery volume ranks first in the world in the industry.

"5g for home scenarios, there will be more types of application products, such as more forms of Internet devices and intelligent terminals, and the demand is bursting. In this regard, our family peripheral product series is also increasing accordingly. " She continued.

On the whole, ZTE is now forming a new development matrix under the development opportunity of 5g era.

Chen Zhiping told the 21st century economic reporter that the traditional three major businesses of operators, government enterprises and consumers are the foundation of enterprise development, and ZTE will continue to lay a solid foundation.

New business areas are also closely related to the company's industry competitiveness. She analyzed that the application of 5g industry and the digital transformation of enterprises are closely related to the general situation of the national initiative and the application demand of the current to B market; Automotive electronics is very popular at present, and ZTE is also accumulating at the same time.

"We are very optimistic about these three areas, which is why we started to put forward the idea of" strengthening the foundation and expanding the new "this year, that is, to invest in construction in new fields and constantly improve the overall competitiveness." Chen Zhiping said that the most important thing is that ZTE insists on doing the most difficult thing for both traditional business and new business, adhering to the bottom innovation, so as to provide competitive cloud network infrastructure for partners in the industry, provide competitive services for new infrastructure and digital enterprises, and build an industry ecology.