December's been a rocky month so far for Huawei. The company's been faced with a difficult time throughout all of 2018, but on December 1, CFO Wanzhou Meng was arrested by authorities in Canada. Meng has since been granted bail, and while you'd think something along these lines might cause for a big rift in the company, a new report from Bloomberg indicates that the exact opposite has been happening.
At the Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, Bloomberg reports that the company has a top-secret research team that's actively working on technology that'll help it become less and less dependent on the United States.
Yet inside Huawei's Shenzhen headquarters, a secretive group of engineers toil away heedless to such risks. They are working on what's next -- a raft of artificial intelligence, cloud-computing and chip technology crucial to China's national priorities and Huawei's future. As the trade war drags on, China's government has pushed to create an industry that is less dependent on cutting-edge U.S. semiconductors and software.
The report continues with:
A sprawling room at its Shenzhen campus is filled with digital mock-ups of how banks, retail stores and city streets would look like with Huawei's technological capabilities. That tech is created a short drive away, inside a research lab nicknamed the "White House." Visitors there are rare. Yet the mock-up room, called the "vertical industries exhibition hall," welcomes guests and imagines a future where companies and governments use Huawei's cloud and AI to crunch data, spur sales and make cities see and hear everything.
The Huawei Enterprise Business Group is responsible for selling various components to vendors for cloud services, smart cities, and other IoT devices. Right now, it's reported that this technology will net Huawei over $10 billion in total revenue before 2018 is over.
It's likely that the hostility towards Huawei will continue as to head into 2019, and should that happen, it looks like the company's preparing itself to keep on chugging no matter what's thrown its way.
