As the world’s largest supplier of telecommunications equipment, Huawei has continuously invested over 10% of its annual revenue back into R&D. In 2019, the company’s R&D expenditure totalled CNY131,659 million, accounting for 15.3% of its total revenue.
Global leading ICT infrastructure provider Huawei has ranked No. 6 in BCG’s recent released list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2020, moved up by 42 places. This is the highest ranking for the tech giant since it first made the list in 2012. According to the report by Boston Consulting Group, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Huawei occupy the top 6 spots in the new ranking, followed by Alibaba, IBM, Sony and Facebook. Founded in 1987, Huawei is a private company fully owned by its employees.
The ranking is based on a survey of 2,500 global innovation executives and assesses companies’ performance on four dimensions of Global “Mindshare”, Industry Disruption, Industry Peer View and Value Creation. This year, BCG also added a new scoring dimension that captures each company’s variety and intensity of boundary breaking, by assessing its ability to breach established industry entry barriers and play in an array of markets outside its own.
In terms of 5G, Huawei invested 4 billion USD in the past decade, which makes it the global leader in this next-generation technology. To further commercial adoption and promote new innovation in 5G applications, the company has established 5G joint innovation centres together with carriers worldwide.
According to its annual report, the tech giant is shifting itself from an innovation 1.0 model to Innovation 2.0, which means breakthroughs in basic theory and developing new basic technologies, driven by shared vision for the future.
In the global fight against COVID-19, Huawei doubled down its innovation efforts and launched the Anti-COVID-19 Partner Program that focuses on AI, remote office, smart healthcare and online education, to support the fight against the pandemic. Its AI-assisted diagnosis, for example, could output CT quantification results in seconds and help frontline medical staff detect COVID-19 cases.
“When we began the research for this 14th edition of BCG’s Most Innovative Companies report, COVID-19 had not yet emerged. As we explored the data and interacted with clients, however, it became clear that this year’s core findings—about the advantages of scale and the imperative for serial innovation—may be even more relevant today as innovation leaders need to adapt to rapidly shifting patterns of supply, demand, consumer behaviour, and ways of doing business,” wrote the author of the BCG report.
