A website operated by Chinese technology giant Huawei released a video on November 3 to publicize a major conference held at the corporate campus in Dongguan Songshan Lake Science and Technology Industrial Park. The event was attended by founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei and chairman Liang Hua. In the video, Ren announced that Huawei is going to diversify its portfolio and establish five new business units, which he also dubbed “army groups”. According to an article from SCMP about the event, the new business units are “cross-department teams” that will seek opportunities outside of the company’s core business areas such as servers, consumer electronics, and telecommunication equipment. The five army groups respectively target the following fields or sectors: coal mining, smart highways, ports and customs, energy solutions for datacenters, and smart PV.
Huawei’s subsidiary Huawei Digital Power will manage the units pertaining to energy solutions for datacenters and smart PV. Furthermore, ambitious revenue targets have been set for the next two years. The datacenter energy unit aims to reach RMB 15 billion for 2022 and RMB 22.5 billion for 2023, whereas the smart PV unit aims to reach RMB 20 billion for 2022 and RMB 30 billion for 2023.
Widely recognized as the miracle and leader of China’s technology sectors, Huawei since its inception has been able to rise to the top in many fields within a short time span. Huawei first entered the PV market in 2013 as an inverter manufacturer. By 2015, Huawei had successfully outworked many established inverter brands to become the global market leader in terms of product shipments. This title had been retained up to 2020 with the global shipment share reaching almost 25%, according to the reporting by Chinese news outlets. By drawing on 30 years’ worth of expertise in ICT technologies, Huawei is able to provide intelligent PV solutions that stand out in the competition.
Industry insiders believe that the R&D efforts of the smart PV unit will also revolve around inverter because this section of the solar energy supply chain is open to new intelligent solutions and extended hardware or service support. The coverage of the announcement by Chinese news outlets presented a very positive outlook for the new business units. They stated that Huawei’s smart PV unit could provide solutions and services for the various county-level renewable energy projects in China. Potential successes achieved by the unit will contribute to the market growth of new energy technologies in China as well as the global efforts in energy transition.
For customers in the PV market, Huawei currently offers smart string inverters, power controllers, communication dongles, monitoring software, battery modules, sensors, and many other related products. Its solutions cover all the major market segments (i.e., utility-scale, residential, and commercial). To link up its PV hardware and software and manage them under a unified control scheme, Huawei has created a proprietary platform known as SolarFusion. In a related news, website JUVE Patent reported on November 4 that a German court has upheld a decision that favors Huawei in a patent case with SolarEdge.