Lee Jun-ho (58), vice president, has been the CSO (chief security officer) of Huawei’s Korean branch for five years. He came from Samsung and worked as an executive at Daum Communications and Naver before joining Huawei in 2020. We met to hear about Huawei, the symbol of China’s IT powerhouse. He started by saying, “I’m worried about Korea.” He said, “Many Koreans try to deny China’s progress by saying, ‘China is nothing special,’” He took out an earphone. When I put it in my ear, the fit, performance, and price range (around 270,000 won) all surpassed Samsung or Apple products. It was a new Huawei product. It led to the story of ‘996.’ ‘9 a.m. to work, 9 p.m. to leave, 6 days a week.’ He said, “Not only Huawei, but also companies like Alibaba and Tencent usually work 996. I heard a former Alibaba executive say, ‘What is 996? When I was at Alibaba, I worked 007 (working 7 days a week without leaving work).”
In Korea, where even 52 hours a week is not enough and people are demanding a 4-day workweek, isn’t the emphasis on diligence an anachronism? He said, “I thought the same thing when I worked at Samsung and Naver, but when I worked at a Chinese company, all I could think was that it was scary.” He said that the strength to overcome most of the US’s ‘China blockade’ in just 4-5 years came from this. His counter-question was, “How can we compete globally if we don’t do what Huawei does?” He, the oldest person at Huawei’s Korean branch, said, “The CEO is in his early 40s, and there are almost no people over 45. Huawei’s culture is to work like crazy when you’re at your peak.”
He showed a video of Huawei’s R&D campus in Dongguan, China. On a site half the size of Yeouido (1.8 million m2), 30,000 researchers and 5,000 support staff work. Dozens of red-roofed European castle-like buildings with a lake in the background are reminiscent of a theme park. When moving between research centers, you take a tram (train). Huawei’s total R&D personnel is 110,000 (55% of employees), and its R&D spending over the past 10 years has amounted to 200 trillion won. I was speechless that this was the site of 996.
The topic of future strategies continued.
“Korea seems to be unable to find competitors right now. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang pointed out that ‘Huawei is our future competitor.’ Koreans think of Huawei as a communications equipment or mobile phone company, and a company that has grown thanks to the Chinese government. Look at Huawei’s business portfolio. It includes smartphones, communications equipment, autonomous driving systems, networks, computing, cloud, and even electrical storage devices. They are all world-class, and they are focused on the AI ecosystem. The US saw that, and Jensen Huang saw that.”
A country of counterfeit goods has become the world’s leading technology country in an instant. It is no exaggeration to say that the China we knew is gone. China’s AI (artificial intelligence) DeepSec is amazing, but it is also a superpower in areas that will be responsible for the future of mankind, such as drones (70% of the global market share), electric vehicles (60%), secondary batteries (68%), and robots (40%). The United States should be afraid.
China has many backward elements, such as issues with transparency and integrity. This is where the ‘theory of the superiority of a democratic country over a dictatorship’ comes up. However, it is a completely different story when it comes to ‘preparing for the future.’ As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said, “In the past, if you looked to Silicon Valley to see the future, now look to Huawei.” Now, it seems like China is the one we should learn from. It’s not that all of our society wants to be like China. How about we try to imitate China at least in the field of global competition? “Just as Japan tried to learn from Korea a dozen years ago, isn’t it time for Korea to learn from China?” This is what he said at the end of the interview.
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