Huawei Ceo Quotes

Months before his Davos debut, Xi had struck a different tone in a speech to Chinese tech titans and Communist Party leaders in Beijing for a conference on “cyber security and informatization.” To an audience that included Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, high-profile People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers, and most of China’s political elite, Xi exhorted China to focus on “gaining breakthroughs in core technology as quickly as possible.” Above all, “core technology” meant semiconductors. Xi didn’t call for a trade war, but his vision didn’t sound like trade peace, either. “We must promote strong alliances and attack strategic passes in a coordinated manner. We must assault the fortifications of core technology research and development…. We must not only call forth the assault, we must also sound the call for assembly, which means that we must concentrate the most powerful forces to act together, compose shock brigades and special forces to storm the passes.” Donald Trump, it turned out, wasn’t the only world leader who mixed martial metaphors with economic policy. The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world’s second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.

Digitization: Germany fell asleep on the job. According to the Digital Economy and Society Index, in 2022—one year after Merkel left office—Germany sits literally just above the EU average, and Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Malta, Spain, Luxemburg, Estonia, Austria, Slovenia, and France are all doing better. German administrative bodies still work largely in analog mode, with pen and paper. Internet access and cell phone coverage is poor. As the newsmagazine Der Spiegel put it: “Germany is a FAX machine.” And if Angela Merkel had had her way, the Chinese state-owned company Huawei would have won the contract to expand the German 5G network.