Huawei R&D Leadership, Public Sector Digital Transformation and Resilience with Hong-Eng Koh - E426

BRAVE partnered with Huawei to arrange this interview with Mr. Hong-Eng Koh, Global Chief Public Services Industry Scientist of Huawei. The three main themes:

1. Public Sector Digital Transformation: Mr. Hong-Eng Koh shared his journey from the Singapore Police Force to leading Huawei's global public sector team. He emphasized the significance of digital transformation in Singapore, starting with computerizing police reports in the 1990s to national projects like the Public Services Online and the Broadband Infrastructure for Government. He also highlighted that true digital transformation requires a coordinated, high-level approach across all government agencies. He stressed the need for a unified network, cloud, and platform to achieve efficiency and overcome bureaucratic inertia.

2. Huawei R&D Leadership: Mr. Hong-Eng Koh elaborated on Huawei’s extensive commitment to research and development, with over 55% of its 200,000 employees dedicated to R&D globally, including significant investments in Singapore and Europe. He explained how Huawei’s integrated technology stack enables rapid innovation and emphasized Huawei’s focus on continuous innovation and customer-centric solutions, which drive its competitive edge and resilience. He cited Huawei’s substantial investment in R&D, spending over 20% of its revenue, and its global patent leadership, holding the top spot in patent applications for six consecutive years.

3. Geopolitical Resilience: Mr. Hong-Eng Koh discussed Huawei’s adaptability in a decoupling world. He described how Huawei worked hard to maintain customer trust by ensuring reliable product delivery during crises such as COVID-19. Koh emphasized Huawei's culture of never giving up and working together as a pack, which fosters resilience and commitment to customer satisfaction. He also noted that the geopolitical challenges have pushed Huawei to be more transparent and open, ultimately benefiting the company.

Jeremy and Mr. Hong-Eng Koh also talked about the evolution of AI and its future impact, the importance of digital sovereignty, the open vs. closed-source software debate, and customer-centric approaches during crises.

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(01:32) Jeremy Au:

Hi! I'm really excited to have you on the show. It's a pleasure to see Huawei in action. Could you share a little bit more about yourself?

(01:39) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Great. Firstly, Jeremy, thanks for having me on this conversation. So my name is Hong-Eng. I'm a Singaporean, live in Singapore, but I report to Huawei Headquarters.

I'm part of the global public sector team because in the Huawei enterprise business, public sector is actually the largest chunk. We have customers around 100 countries in the government, education, healthcare. So I'm actually leading the team of industry expert partly because of my background.

So I used to work for Singapore government in different jobs and also involve digitalization. And that was when I got to know different companies. In fact, I joined the first company in my life, MNC, partly because of my jobs in the Singapore government. And after spending 16 years in a US company, I joined Huawei more than eight years ago.

(02:21) Jeremy Au:

Amazing. We'll definitely get into that, but could you share a little bit more about what you were like in your first few jobs, you were in the government, what was that like?

(02:27) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Sure. In fact, for me, it was not much of a choice because, Singapore, many of us were encouraged to apply for scholarships. Likewise, when I was in junior college I guess my result was okay, and I was encouraged to apply for scholarship. And for all you know, I received a police scholarship, so I ended up as a police officer. doing different jobs, including criminal investigation, operation, crime prevention and so on. But my last position was heading the technology.

(02:53) Jeremy Au:

So obviously the police force, it's very much on the ground and then you say you're doing some of that digital transformation. So what does that look like from your perspective?

(03:00) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

So at the time that was in the 1990s, right? So I think that was still very much the simple computerization, or we call it digitalization. So basically, it's from offline to online. So many of the manual processes are computerized to make it more efficient. For example, a long time ago, to lodge a police report, it will be manually written. Can you imagine? But today, it's all computerized. And of course, computerization is not just to make it more efficient. Because once you capture the data, you can do a lot of analytics as well. That will be the subsequent phases of the transformation.

(03:30) Jeremy Au:

And after that, you joined a private sector. Could you share more about that?

(03:33) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

It was semi-private because of the background in technology. So I joined NCS, National Computer System. And I was very fortunate because when I joined NCS, that was when Singapore was really moving at a fast speed in terms of the whole digital transformation of the government. So I was involved in the very first major project called the Public Services Online, where we try to offer citizens people-centric services.

Because in any government, any country, or whether it's federal government or city government, they tend to have stovepipes because different professionalists in different departments end up with a siloed system, so were trying to provide that citizen-centric services so that was the very exciting project that I did. And since then, I think Singapore has been ranked very highly in terms of e-government compared to all the other countries.

(04:21) Jeremy Au:

That was really the heyday of NCS, especially.

(04:23) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Exactly.

(04:23) Jeremy Au:

So what were some projects that you did back then?

(04:25) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Okay, a lot was a nationwide project because NCS back then was already a big company, corporatized under NCB and subsequently acquired by Singtel, right? And over there, there are many teams, but I was mainly doing government-wide projects. In fact, there was a project called Big Broadband Infrastructure for Government. So it's basically sharing the networking, sharing the data center, and right down to the public services online, where we build a public services infrastructure to provide citizen centric services, whether it's G2C or G2B, getting the whole of government to work together. And little did I know that that started the trend for many national digital transformation .

(05:00) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. I mean, since then, the Singapore government and the public-private sector has really been focused on that digital transformation wave. Do you remember some of the trade offs or kind of like planning parameters, because, a lot of people look to Singapore today as that model.

(05:12) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think number one, Singapore, I would say, I've been doing international business for over 20 years, even before Huawei. And the good thing is that the Singapore brand is definitely helping my career a lot. So everywhere I go, "Oh, Singapore is very successful," so I'll definitely be thanking them. Thank you for seeing highly of Singapore, but the success of Singapore, I would say, cannot be easily replicated because of the environments, the parameters, right? So things like the stability in the government, that's very important. And being a small country has this advantage.

And the other thing is, of course, the literacy in the public service, the citizens, these are all important. And of course, the budget itself, whether you're willing to invest, but I think in terms of true digital transformation, the top difficulty will always be bureaucracy agencies trying to protect their own infrastructure and data. And this is why more and more countries are getting successful when they elevate the organization that is driving national digital transformation because traditionally, whether it's e -overnment or digital transformation, maybe it's done at one of the ministry of ICT and so on, but many governments realize that for that to happen, you have to be above the other agencies.

So for example, in many years ago, China started the big data management bureau and in every province, the big data management bureau reports to the governor directly, right? But over the years, they actually dropped the word big. So now they call it Data Management Bureau, but it's the same in Saudi Arabia. They created an organization called SDAIA, Saudi Authority for Data and Artificial Intelligence.. And again, they are the one driving the national data center, national cloud, even the national use of AI. So the whole of government works together. So if you talk about digital transformation, especially digital government, the whole of government is working together with the relevant governance and the structure at a high level. I think those are important success factors.

(06:52) Jeremy Au:

I think what's interesting is that you would think that in a bureaucracy, everybody be jumping at a chance to digitalize because you're making things more efficient.

Why is it that bureaucracy doesn't seem to work out for, especially for this kind of transformational stuff. Like normally programs by programs are very good infrastructure programs, but it feels like digital transformation always seems to be in order of complexity, more difficult.

(07:11) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think without fail, every country, I've been to, 88, 89 countries as part of my job, and every country, every government knows they have to do something on digitalization, on digital transformation, but most of them tends to do it department-centric. So, the Ministry of Education wants to do their own thing. The Ministry of Finance does their own thing. Ministry of Social Security wants to do their own thing, which is not wrong. They are doing what they are good at, but in terms of the whole government perspective, because the citizens or the businessmen or the visitors see the government as one, I don't see you as different agencies. So it's important. And not only that, we are not just talking about the people centric services, we're also talking about consuming the infrastructure, the budget of the country because if every department wants to build their own network, their own data center, their own cloud platform, it's going to cost a lot of money to the government.

This is why in Huawei, the global public sector department, we are pushing the concept digital transformation at a true digital transformation must be what we call one network, one cloud, one platform. When I say one network, it doesn't mean one network because they are different networking technology, but it means that it's a unified network that can be shared by different agencies of course, we take into consideration different agencies may have different needs on cybersecurity data protection. The second layer, when we say one cloud, again, it doesn't mean one physical cloud. It could be a mix of cloud, but again, it's the unified way of doing things. And lastly, the platform is where we talk about data governance and also talk about all the AI tools and so on and so forth.

If you look back at the 40, 50 years ago when the Singapore government started the National Computer Board to do the National Computerization Program, that was, I believe it's 40 years ago. We tend to build systems by itself. So there's a need for text collection, we build a system. There's a need for hospital information system, we build a system. And we build a system, it means the application, the database, the server, the storage, the network is very siloed. Then over the years, maybe 30 years ago, we start seeing the hardware and software decoupling.

So the hardware is a layer. Software is a separate layer. So you are not locked into particular hardware. This is what we talk about, hardware virtualization, but I think today's context, especially moving forward where transformation is happening very fast, where you can roll out many services especially with AI, we are seeing the data decoupling. So the data is decoupled from the software, the software is decoupled from the hardware. So the more it makes sense, you have the one network, one cloud, one platform approach. And all the services in future, sometimes we call it microservices. It's not going to be a very hard software with the database is built in. So the data should be separate at a layer, but when we do all these things, we always have to be mindful of cybersecurity, privacy issue, and of course the latest topic is on sovereignty.

(09:44) Jeremy Au:

We'll definitely circle back to that. And then from there, from NCS, you left, where did you go to?

(09:48) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Okay, because of the PS Online project, the whole system was architected on Java technology.

And we ended up using a lot of servers and storage from a company called Sun Microsystems. It's a US Silicon Valley company. In fact, the slogan for Sun back then was the network is a computer. Sun was way ahead of its time. That was 20, 30 years ago. They called the network as a computer. Basically they realize the power is in the network, which is like what we call cloud computing. So because of that project, Peers Online, someone in some microsystems got to know me and hired me. So I joined Sun. I was there for more than 10 years. And again, I was doing different positions from local to regional to global because of my public sector background. So it's a mix of a smart city, safe city, education, healthcare.

And after 10 years, Sun was acquired by Oracle. So I ended up in Oracle for another six years, but the 16 years I spent in the US company more or less is doing, as an industry expert, to help customer see their needs and to design their business architecture, leading to a technical architecture.

(10:49) Jeremy Au:

Amazing. What did you learn at Sun as well as Oracle?

(10:52) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Good question. Because that was my very first MNC. And of course it was a culture shock to me because I used to work from Singapore government or government-linked company. Then I went to Sun Microsystems MNC. It's interesting, I do have many Singapore friends that, they were already working in an American MNC. And

One strong advice was always when you're in an MNC, you work for yourself. You don't work for the company. Okay. It sounds quite profound, but basically what I'm trying to say is that those MNC companies, they don't really take care of you. So you have to, whatever you're doing is you are there to make money. Of course, you must make sure you're helping the company to make money. That's why you can earn money, but you have to balance. That's what they're saying.

The other thing of interest was when I joined Sun, I got to know the history, the values of Sun. And one of the famous quotation that I always remember was from the Chief Scientist of Sun back then. This gentleman is called Bill Joy. Bill Joy was one of the founders. He was the Chief Scientist. He always say that the smartest person is not in this room. Very important because I feel that if you think the smartest person is in the room is probably, there's no more progress. So we must always be very open-minded. We are not the best. We need the best, or we collaborate with the best. And I think even Mother Teresa was quoted saying that, right? I can do what you cannot do. You can do what I cannot do. Together we can do great things. So I think that collaboration is important. The moment an individual or a company or in personal life, you think you're already at the best. It means you're at a peak. You start coming down.

(12:12) Jeremy Au:

And I think what's interesting is that, that's also like you said, the network is a computer as well, right? There was a lot of that debate between closed source, open source, alliances, versus in-housing. Could you share a little bit more about that wave?

(12:23) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think we are still talking about that. After a few decades, we are still talking about that. Isn't it? If you look at mobile phone market, you have the Apple that is totally closed. It's proprietary, because they think it's better, safer. Of course, you have the Android, and Huawei now has the Harmony, which is more open. So I think the debate will always be there because if you talk about open source software, some people will say that, you get to control the software, you can see the vulnerability and so on, but at the same time, people will say, even the bad guys will be seeing. So I think at the end of the day, each has its own merits, and of course, some disadvantages as well, but in what we are seeing today, I should say fortunately, I should be more positive. Fortunately, we are living through this age of the trade war, that we get to experience what it's like, and digital sovereignty becomes very important. So open source software last time was more in terms of ease of working with other modules in terms of supposed to be more secure than closed source, but now open source is also important to safeguard the country's digital sovereignty. That you actually own it. That you can do something about it, but I think the debate will be ongoing and I don't think it will reach a day that someone will make a decision which is the best, right? So whether it's open source or closed source, what is important is the standards behind.

Even in a closed source, you can have standards, because remember what I said earlier about collaboration, working together. So even Huawei, we feel strongly that we need that ecosystem. We need to work together whether it's hardware, software or other components, it's important to achieve that greatness effect just because we are working together and for technology to work together, it's important to have those standards.

(13:48) Jeremy Au:

What's interesting is that, that time felt it was an open environment of time, right? Because a lot of this, like you mentioned of the trade war and all that stuff, is feels more current, but that time, I felt like the whole internet was free and open.

(13:59) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Very free, very open. And that time when the world is really globalized in technology, we are seeing lots of innovation and R&D, and that's important. In fact, if you look at the US, it used to be a very good place. It's so open. You look at Elon Musk, you look at Mark Zuckerberg, they were not Americans. They moved there. So I think the openness is important to work together. So it's a scientific community. I still remember when I was a young government officer, when we traveled, we needed to carry different mobile phones because of different standards, but slowly the world moves to GSM. So one device can be used in any country. So that is the ideal world, but my fear is with the trade war, are we going to see a splinternet? Are we going to see technology diverging and up? We're going to use different devices or different standards, right? So for a small country like Singapore, definitely it will be a concern, because that will increase our cost.

(14:47) Jeremy Au:

So I think these are all things that people are concerned about, right? Like trade war, decoupling, digital sovereignty, splinternet. Could you share a little bit more about what you're thinking or what you're observing?

(14:57) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think end of the day politics being politics they still need the voters. And I think in any country, the people must make a decision through the votes because what is good for people is when people can see. As I said earlier, if there's a divergence of technology, it's not going to be good for many people. The cost may go up and all this thing, and it's not good for innovation. So I'm still very positive. I don't think it will go back to the old days, but we probably will see a new norm in the way we cooperate and the way we compete. So it's a competition. And I think largely, it's due to lack of awareness because like it or not, we are living in a world where there's lots of fake news. So if you are a person that is very gullible, you're not doing your own research to see what's happening out there, you may be easily influenced by the media, whether it's a mass media or social media. So this is why the younger generation, especially with generative AI, that skill to differentiate, to analyze the context, what is true, what is not true is becoming even more important because otherwise you can be easily influenced by the media, especially generative AI.

(16:00) Jeremy Au:

We'll definitely get to that. When we talk about the splinternet, what's interesting is that it feels like the world used to be like converging on common standards, right? So I think GSM. And everybody felt like we were all converging on the same standard bodies as well to kind of push them out and advance the frontier, but it now feels like there's almost like a duplicate of everything, right? There's one left, one right.

(16:17) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

It's not that bad. It's not that bad. We are still here so we are still working on the same path, but because of some irresponsible political move, we may see certain hiccups along the way, but I hope that common sense prevails and things will be back on track, but having said that, there is a good side effect because I think, again, if you ask me, when I was in Sun Microsystem, one of the things that Sun, as a company, was very strong promoting is that the competition drives innovation. Competition drives innovation, which is good. If that is the principle, it's good.

(16:47) Jeremy Au:

And I think it's interesting because earlier you were sharing with me about how Huawei has been really doing a lot of fundamental R&D. You can get KL standard and you're like, "Hey, I can build a better version of this, right?" So can you share a little bit more about the R&D focus?

(17:00) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Okay. Huawei, unlike my previous company it's interesting, partly because we are a private company, or the most of the employees are the shareholders. We are not owned by any institution. So we are very willing to invest in R&D. And this is why we are doing well consistently over the years, despite the international pressure, and of course, despite the COVID and so on.

(17:18) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

If you look at Huawei, we have more than 200,000 employees, but more than 55% are in R&D. And our R&D is not just in China. It's all over the world. Even in Singapore, we have quite a big number of R&D engineers. So our R&D labs are all over the world, especially in Europe as well. And if you look at our spending the last few years, we spend more than 20% of our revenue back to R&D. I think on average, Western technology company, we are talking about 10%. So we spend double that and the spending the headcount that we have, and the patent registration. So for the last six years, if you look at the record of the United Nation World Intellectual Property Organization, we are the number one in applying patents.

Number one for six years, we apply but of course you apply patents without coming out innovation, that's useless. So those R&D, those patents lead us to many technologies, like the Nearlink that I was talking about. And there are many examples. There are tons of example. In fact, after 16 years in US MNC, I was getting a bit complacent because day in, day out, I'm doing my job. I'm the expert in this public service transylvation. I know what I'm doing, so it's a bit stagnant, but Huawei is a company because literally every year we launch new products. And the new products actually keep us very excited because we are the industry expert. We must be able to see the value of the product back into the industry.

So I'm going to give you one specific example. Hospitals, healthcare. It's very common now in China, healthcare, hospitals, everything is wireless. Even your intravenous drips, all your sensors. I'm wearing a Huawei watch with an airbag that can do this blood pressure. It's all sensors, but your biggest problem is Wi Fi access point. I'm not sure whether you encounter when you have a big house or big office, we have too many access point, it interfere with one another. When you have too few access points, there's a blind spot. So can you imagine the patient being pushed around from the ward to the x-ray room, and somehow the signal lost, and the nursing station may thought this guy, the heartbeat, or whatever, right? So this is not acceptable. So what did Huawei do after we hear such a feedback from the customer? We went back to the drawing board, we come out with a new product, new technology because typically if you look at a Wi Fi access point, it has three layers of technology: the controller, the radio unit, and the antenna. So the controller radio unit and the antenna are in a box. So what do we do? We split up that into three parts. So our controller is a box and we are connected to eight radio units. Each radio unit can be connected to eight antennas. Eight multiplied by eight is 64, and so this whole thing, it's one access point with 64 antenna.

So in the whole hospital ward, you can deploy this one access point with 64 antenna. So when you, the device is connected to antenna, it's okay to connect to multiple antenna, because it's the same system. So you have what we call this data loss roaming in that concept. So we actually come at this product mainly for the use case in hospital But of course you can use in actually hotels as well, but it will not be good for a classroom because you're talking about hundreds of students. So concurrently we have too many devices you still need traditional WiFi, but this is one example that we always listen to voice of customer and try to come by a new innovation. Not only we solve customer problem. We created a product that others don't have. That will increase our revenue. And this is why, if you look at global public sector, at least for the eight years that I'm in Huawei, our global public sector business has been growing very healthily despite all the rumors, all the fake news. We are doing very well. And as I say, our public sector customers are in more than 100 countries. So we're actually well trusted by many government agencies around the world.

(20:31) Jeremy Au:

And you know what's interesting is that it really feels like it's not just obviously the number patents, but it feels like the velocity, right? Because you can put a large R&D budget, but you know, it feels like the velocity that the throughput or the output seems to be on a faster cycle, or how does that work from your perspective?

(20:47) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Okay, it's again because of the headcount that we have and the process. In fact, our Integrated Product Development, IPD, I remember Huawei many years ago paid millions of dollars to IBM to help us do the consultancy to come up with IPD. So IPD is a very stringent process from concept to product to alpha, beta, right? So the whole process is well. And as I said, we have a huge number of engineers to do that. And sometimes, as I said, when you are forced in a corner, you work even faster. So if you look at during COVID, our Wi Fi access point was selling very well, even in European countries.

And for many reasons that number one there was a global shortage, right? And, and number two the cost, but we maintain low cost. In fact, my competitor to buy the Wi Fi, to sell the Wi Fi access point, it may take eight, nine months to deliver. Huawei committed and we deliver in five, six weeks. And it's not just a product. So the IPD, the integrated product development, right down to the sales marketing, I think we are very cohesive organization to push that. And every product we don't just, although we listen to customer, we also have to do a lot of due diligence, whether there is a value because we are still a profitable company.

We are not a nonprofit company. We must make sure whatever product we do can sell. And all this thing. And we also have a good management supply chain. That's important because our R&Ds are everywhere. We have manufacturing in different countries, but also the supply chain. So during the pandemic, I think there was a global, a slow down in the supply chain, but what we still managed to do well in terms of all these supply chain, the products coming together.

But I think what is important is the will. Is the will in Huawei. If you look at the core values of Huawei. I think I try to record the four. The first is customer focus. Customer first, customer focus. Number two is, if I translate is basically, you must really work hard, perseverance and so on. The third, we must be willing to work in a very difficult environment. And the fourth is self-reflection. In fact, the fourth is very interesting because in the original Chinese version, if you do a direct translation to English, it means self-criticism, but many foreigners, including myself, would be a bit worried, right? Why am I joining a company that I need to criticize myself? So the English version, we call it self-reflection. So basically, the culture in Huawei is that we are prepared to work hard. We work hard. We are prepared to work even harder, even in harsh environment.

(22:56) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

When I first joined Huawei, I was very curious why many countries in Africa like to use Huawei. And I found the reason. It's not because of whatever people say, because there's funding, whatever. It's because the willingness for Huawei people to continue to serve the customer. Remember Ebola? Ebola was very deadly. During Ebola, most Western companies pull out. Huawei stayed on and the employees stayed on. They will not force, they stay on. They stay on because they want to serve the customer. That is the Huawei culture and they know by winning deals, they also get to earn money because this company is employee owned. So whatever we make, it doesn't go to institution. It goes to them. So of course, there's still the monetary incentive, right? But end of the day, it reflects the culture. It reflects the culture of the company. This is why even during COVID, after I was stuck in Singapore for 18 months, I was getting a bit unsettled and I was preparing to travel. Of course, my family was worried, but with a lot of assurance because Huawei actually did a great job in terms of protecting our own employees. So I traveled to Africa. So when I went to Africa, the customer were like, are you crazy? Most of the Western companies pull out and you guys are still flying here to meet us, to help us solve problems.

(23:59) Jeremy Au:

And you mentioned that you were feeling stagnant in the Western MNC and then you were surprised when you enter Huawei. Could you share this with me into how and why you chose to join Huawei?

(24:09) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Okay. It's not really stagnant. I'm so used to doing my job. I can literally, I'm getting very comfortable. In fact, to some extent, maybe a bit complacent, but Huawei is a company partly because of the innovation. It keep coming a new technology. And and I always like to say Huawei has so many products And in public sector, we are probably the only industry I can sell any product that Huawei has. It may not be relevant to, some product may not be relevant to banking industry.

For example, I even sell critical radio communication system for emergency services. Banking doesn't need that, right? So we have many things. So that keep me excited because I'm an industry specialist. I like to help customers with the digital transformation. So that keeps me going. And number two, as I said earlier, because of the values, the work culture is really quite pressurizing to work in Huawei because expectation is very high, right?

But why did I join Huawei? In my last company, at the job that I was holding as an industry expert, I was actually at the highest level. I was already at highest level. So it's a very senior position in my previous company. So when Huawei found me through a headhunter, I was not interested at all. Partly, I did not know anything about Huawei. That was before the trade war went open. That was before the US targets Huawei. So everybody did not know about Huawei. The only thing I knew about Huawei was the fiber modem in my house because in Singapore, we have the next generation broadband, the fiber.

Actually, it's all Huawei. So the only thing I know is Huawei because I'm not from the telecommunication industry. I don't know about 3G, 4G, 5G. And at the time I did not use Huawei phone. So I did not know. So I was a bit sarcastic. Actually, I told the head hunter that in my company, I was already the most senior. Why do you want me to join a Chinese company selling router? She and I sort of laugh it off, but she did not give up on me. So for the one year she kept in touch with me and got me to talk to different people and I did my own research and I spoke to some Singapore friends who are working in Huawei to find out more.

But what changed my mind was really when they invited me to Shenzhen to take a look at the real stuff that they have. I tell you the moment I saw I was like, Wow, so this is Huawei. Okay, firstly, a lot of us have this bad, wrong impression that China product is cheap, is no good. It's, it's not true. End of the day, whether a product is good or not, it's not due to the manufacturer. It's due to the businessman driving it. If you're prepared to pay high cost, you get good quality, such as iPhone. Most iPhone today still is made in China, right? But if you want to make a lot of money, you get the lousiest factory to build, of course the quality is bad.

So when I went to Shenzhen headquarter of Huawei, I was surprised by the depth, the breadth of technology Huawei has, and in terms of quality. So that really changed my mind. Then, of course, it came the proper, the relevant interview that convinced me. And don't forget, at the time, I did not know what was ahead of me because at the time I thought Huawei is just another MNC. It's just MNC. I did not get into the side that I'm not sure what's ahead. The US is going to take action against Huawei, but we have come a long way. So I've been in company already more than eight years.

(26:58) Jeremy Au:

And, you mentioned that one of the things that you had to change through was the culture, right? So could you share more about what you felt was the transition in that culture from your perspective?

(27:05) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Okay. For me , it's Singaporean. You and I Singaporean, we know our Singapore culture. I was in US MNC for 16 years. I'm used to the culture.

So when I first went to Huawei, of course it was a culture shock, very different. And basically everyone is expected to work hard, but the good thing is you get compensated because of the system in Huawei, right? If the whole company does well, not just your department, you get better bonus. And we have a sort of a share scheme, even though we are not publicly listed, there's some sort of private share scheme. So based on the share that you have, you get dividend. So the culture of working hard is definitely there. And frankly, there is no black and white to force you must work every day or whatever, but people tend to behave this way. So you still have people that have a proper night off or weekend off, but you see very often that people just stay on.

So even when I sometimes travel to China for a meeting, I'll be in the office until 9, 10PM, or weekend you have training. I'm not sure whether that is a Chine culture, but of course, remember Jack Ma did talk about 996, right? So I guess it's similar in other Chinese company, but in other companies will be probably different. But interestingly, Huawei, we do abide by the local practice or even local legislation. So for example, Huawei office in Europe, some of the Europe country, we must abide by the rule, up to certain hours, your lights must be switched off, all these things. So we do follow, but in terms of the culture, a key thing, what I'm seeing the difference is that people know for every effort they put in, if any result, they will get the reward, right? It's quite different from a public listed company. And the other thing is that in this company, everyone is trying their best. People will not say no to you. I'm not sure whether it's a Huawei culture or the Chinese culture, but people will try their best to help you achieve what is needed. But the other culture is interesting, very different from the West, the frankness. So during the meetings, everyone very frank, straight to the point, even literally saying you're not good, all this thing. Whereas the Western world is that in the meeting room, everybody tends to be more kind to each other. But unfortunately outside the meeting room, that's where things happening. People talk behind your back, whatever. But in this company, people tend to be more frank.

And remember I say there are four core values, the last core value, self reflection. We do that actually on a systematic way. So the certain people in Huawei, certain level and above, every year, you're supposed to have a self reflection session. And you'll be open to anyone, not just your bosses, your subordinates, your colleagues, or anyone can join, to listen to yourself, criticizing yourself. And if you do it too mild, people will start commenting. And in Huawei, we actually built a system where people can comment anonymously. So some people, if they're open to direct, they won't want to say, but basically this self reflection thing, it's so institutionalized that people are willing to expose their weaknesses and to say what we must do to learn, to improve and so on. And likewise, people tend to be very upfront. This is why some foreigners, I'm also a foreigner, I'm not a Chinese, working in Huawei, initially they had hard time adjusting. They are adjusting to this frankness, people will tell you this, tell you that. But ultimately, I think generally, people are attacking the issue, not the human.

(30:04) Jeremy Au:

And, you previously wrote, in your past writing, about Huawei's wolf culture, right? And obviously a lot of the press has also written about it, but often it feels like a very external view. Could you share a little bit more about what the wolf culture means?

(30:15) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think to different people, wolf culture means different thing. And when we say wolf culture, you look at the strength of the wolf is the pack. The strength of the pack is the wolf. It's working together. And I think the wolf culture, the main thing is never give up, you strive. You will never say no. So you try your hard to do that. You look at how Huawei started, because we are late in the game. Frankly, we are late in the game, whether in telecommunication or enterprise business, but Huawei people don't give up. I've experienced that many times. So that if you try to convince a customer we are the best choice, most of them say, no, no, no, who are you? I've been using a Western company or this thing. I don't want to use you, but Huawei people don't give up. The culture. We don't give up. We will just continue to approach a customer. I think just like they never give up on me, right? When they try to hire me over. So they keep doing it until the customer one day said, Ooh, you are really very determined. Maybe I'll give you a chance to talk to you, to see.

So I think this wolf culture is important in the context that people don't give up. People always strive to be successful and at the end of the day, we are not just here to sell because in every country, Huawei is there for that country. Most country, we hire 70%, 80% of the local employees. So it's important that we sustain our business. And to do that, we cannot be a fly by night company. You have to bring true values to the customer. So the wolf culture from a positive note is that people are always on the move, willing to do it as a pack and we leverage one another. I think that's important.

(31:32) Jeremy Au:

What's interesting is that, we describe wolf culture as a company culture, right? And from two different dimensions. But it feels like when you read the press, the wolf culture is quite negatively portrayed. I'm not sure how you feel about that.

(31:42) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Okay. Firstly, I think wolf culture is not really a Huawei culture. Remember I said the Huawei has four core values, right? But it's the spirit on never give up that even in a very difficult situation, we'll still fight on. And also leveraging on one another because the wolf is strong because of the pack, and likewise vice versa, but I think the moment, because I used to spend 16 years in US culture, US company, and eight years in Huawei, and we sell almost the same thing. The only thing is Huawei, can sell what many companies must come together to sell because of the entire stack of technology that we have. So it's so clear to me, the world of double standards. People want to bring you down, people want to discriminate against you, anything can also be in a negative way. So that, that is the thing say, but I think we will just leave it to our innovations. The patents were registered, the new products, our business, our sales, to speak for ourselves. You know, customers are not stupid, especially government. Even in Europe, quite a few advanced or western governments are using our solution. So this is why there is a great difference between what you read on the media and the truth. So when people want to bring you down, anything can be negative.

(32:45) Jeremy Au:

And I think what's interesting is that, through this partnership, I've also got the opportunity to see the whole conference. And it really feels that AI is the big theme here, right? And I think it's relevant because of the innovation R&D side. So, you know, there's the storage, you know, there's the controllers. Everything else was really about a strong AI focus. Could you share more about the perspective on AI within Huawei?

(33:04) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Even before I talk about AI, if you look at my last 30, 40 years of career, from public service operation to technology, right, technologies come and go, It was just how long ago when everybody was going crazy with metaverse. Hardly anyone is talking about that now. So whether it's metaverse, blockchain, all sorts of technology, it come and go. and even AI, I think is a natural progress. When your data built up, initially there was no data, you do digitization, computerization, you start having data, when data getting more, you do big data analytics to create more values, and when data, grow even even more, you move to AI, and AI now you move to AI models, you move to generative AI, even AI has gone to different generation right, but about 5 years ago, in many open location. I like to say, the future use of AI will be as user friendly as using a Microsoft Office, for example. And true enough, today, you're a chat GPT that you can use it easily without programming. And my point is that five years later. Probably nobody will talk about JGPT because it's so common now. There'll be some other technology by then.

So if you look at the, the, the history of technology evolution, but what is important is the, data and the, values that data create. It's not the technology. It's not the AI. So it's the values of the technology and as part of industry revolution, certain things could not be done previously because before the revolution, before the new technology, right, like the before the steam engine, there was no steam engine.

Of course you can't go into steam engine, locomotive and so on. So likewise, this technology help us to actually squeeze even more values on the data, but ultimately it's about people. Whatever technologies, is to manage the data and whatever you're doing is to extract the best value from the data to serve the people. I think it's all about people. Any industry is always about human, about people.

You may say it's robotics, whatever, but ultimately it's to reach the people. So from a public services perspective, I've been driving the concept that a true digital transformation, a national or government digital transformation, not only we must provide people centric services, but we must provide proactive and personalized services, the three P's. So people centric, proactive and personalized. So for example, in many countries, to open a restaurant, you need to apply for so many permits across different departments. We are still seeing that in many countries. In fact, recently I also read the news, even in Boston, you have to go through that, right?

So that is only the people centric part. Many governments will stop them to offer people centric services, but with big data and AI, I can actually analyze to provide you proactive and personalized services. For example, proactive you want to open a restaurant, obviously you need to hire people. So I, why can't I analyze all the graduating students record from the ministry of education and to recommend some to you because you need to hire them and you save them from from looking for job is save you from from looking for candidates that has been proactive and personalized is because you want to open certain restaurant. Maybe it's a Japanese restaurant. And because Japanese restaurant, you need a location where there are many Japanese or Japanese loving, food loving people that is, is, is the most appropriate place for you to rent, to open a restaurant. Or maybe because of Japanese food, you need to have the special rice. And we can recommend the suppliers and that will help you lower the cost. Regardless of big data or AI, ultimately it should provide that values to the people. But having said that, AI, we are seeing a very fast change, right? From, from a normal machine learning, we go to unsupervised learning to deep learning, resulting in large model.

So in the traditional AI, you can do simple AI models for different things, but the large model is really getting interesting, where I always say large model is conventional AI on steroids. So you can do a lot more, but it means that you generate a lot of things. And I think we have seen Sora, for example, generative AI, but like some of the events that you attended today, you realize is the cost benefit analysis. Does it make sense? I still remember one of the speaker was saying an interesting thing, the money that you spend to buy the GPU server and technology to generate the video. is many times higher than to hire the Hollywood star and the whole production crew. So you reach a stage now, generative AI, a lot is, is a very novelty type of things. Why is exciting, but is, there real business value going back to the value to the human? So do we really need that? Unless you tell me today you can generate a video at 20 percent of the cost of a full video production, then it makes sense. But today it's still not. So today, generative AI or large model, we are still seeing many novelty, nice to have things, But frankly has little value to human, to people.

(37:32) Jeremy Au:

You know, what's interesting as I was watching all the presentations was that it was not just focused obviously on the microchip setting, which is setting very much the focus of every newspaper article in the press in terms of the chip war, for example, but I thought to see the whole suite of the memory, so far of the whole one stop shop. So you were discussing a little bit about that, like the bottlenecks and chain, could you share more about that?

(37:52) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think people, obviously AI, if you understand how AI works, you're doing thousands of iteration per second to train up the model with lots of data. That's why you need G-P-U-A-C-P-U is not good enough or not fast enough. you need GPU. Unfortunately, most people spend focus on the GPU. and in the real world you realize many organizations spend a lot of money to buy the graphical processing unit. But if you check the utilization rate, it's not that high because the whole system is not just GPU, you must interconnect to your storage, your, all sorts of things, So this is why potentially you have different bottleneck. The connectivity is a bottleneck. Even the storage performance is a bottleneck. And very often in a system, any millisecond delay in the storage could mean minutes of delay in the whole system.

And this is the same because in technology world, there's no single super machine that do everything. We are in a open architecture. We have different layers of technology. It's the same when Huawei first came out in 5G, right? A lot of people think, Oh, Huawei is strong in 5G, meaning the base station, the antenna, the radio access network. It's not true. There are many other components. For example, every tower, every base station, you need connectivity. You can either lay a fiber or use microwave. Huawei actually do R&D to improve our R5 microwave, so that it can catch up with the 5G speed. So you may have a radio access network can do 5G speed, but your backyard hall, the microwave is less than 5G speed, So what's the purpose, And even right down to power consumption. All these are important because traditionally to deploy a 5G base station, our competitor's 5G base station requires more power consumption than the previous 4G base station. So it means that when you change 5G base station. you need to change the power supply. But for Huawei, we are very conscious. Our 5G base station can use the same power supply as for the 4G base station. So it makes sense. So this whole system is interconnected. And this is why you want to design the best system not just individual component.

(39:47) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

And this is why it put Huawei in a very advantageous position because of the layers of technology that we actually have from the microprocessors to the operating system, to the server, to the storage, including database now, and to the cloud stack software and even the AI modeling tools and so on.

So the good thing about Huawei, because we have the whole stack, it's much easier for us to optimize. By having said that every layer is based on standards because we know in the real world some customers need not buy everything from Huawei or they have existing, systems that we need to interoperate. So we are mindful of that as well.

(40:20) Jeremy Au:

And I think it's quite interesting, because that strategy is hard to execute. I mean, theoretically, everybody wants to be a one stop shop, or provide that full suite. What do you think has been some of the trade offs or investments that Huawei has had to make in order to be able to provide that coverage, but also have standards at each level.

(40:34) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Yes. I think, I'm not sure the history, Huawei started selling, reselling some Hong Kong switches, whatever, if you look at the history, of Huawei right? But over the years, we built up all this system, and the first main industry we went in was telecommunication, right? Huawei, after all these switches, routers, we moved into telecommunication, and telecommunication industry, totally dependent on Huawei, every layers of technology. So if you look at what Huawei is doing today, even our digital power, our UPS, our inverter, right down to our cloud stack software, our server storage networking, many of these were created to support the telecommunication industry.

But from there, you realize exactly the same stack. It's the same stack for different industries. I'm sure there was some strategy behind to lead to this entire step. And if you go back to public sector, because my experience is in public sector, from a user to technology provider. I actually have a conclusion over my last eight years experience in Huawei. Why we are doing strongly in public sector globally, mainly for three reasons. The first reason is we have the end to end stack. Because you need to understand in public sector is different from other industry. Banking industry, the technical people they hire, they are really very technical because they build the system in house and maintain in house. But most public sector, the technical people in most country, obviously not some, like Singapore team is of course very strong, but in other countries, the government agency, the technical people are not so technical. They are more the operational person. They are the one writing the tender specification, managing the vendor.

The actual project is left to a system integrator who won the contract, right? And very often a system can fail. And when a system fail, the different, the database will blame operating system. Operating system will blame the server. Server will blame the connectivity. Everybody blame each other, different brand. But to my customer, they say, Oh, at least Huawei, everything is yours. So if something goes wrong, you are responsible. There's no finger pointing. So actually many public sector customers like the fact that we have end to end. But of course we must still win through the, the proper procurement process, the public tender and so on, right? That's the first reason.

Second reason. Huawei, interestingly, as a company, we are customer focused. We are really customer focused. We are willing to take risks at times just to meet the customer requirements. We are flexible, more flexible in the sense because I used to work for a US company for 16 years. No means no. For example, Huawei, We don't do system integrator. We are not system integrator. We want to work with system integrator, but there are some developing countries where there's no local system integrator. So end up, you will say, look, you must have us lower the cost. If you bring in a Chinese system integrator, or you bring in a Western system integrator, the cost will go up.

So since Huawei has so many technology, why don't you also do system integration? So there are extreme cases where the customer strongly requests us to do system integration. We actually do that after analyzing the risk and of course the profit. So that is something I think our customer appreciate, the flexibility.

Third, interestingly, based on feedback, is China's story. Because China. in terms of the effort digital transformation is also not that long ago. Probably started only two, three decades ago, but China being China, they move at China's speed. So China is creating a lot of very exciting digital transformation use cases. And The rest of the world, they know, the government, they know. So they want to see what China is doing. Obviously, they can't copy exactly what China is doing because the geopolitics environment is different. The budget is different. The digital literacy is different, right? But at least they know that is the outcome.

So they are looking at an outcome to learn the China story. And many people know that because Huawei, we do have many customers in China. So we can share some of these use cases. Let me give you a simple use case. Hospitals. We started deploying LIDAR in hospital. You know, LIDAR is, is used for autonomous vehicle right, because of the the accuracy and so on so forth. So in hospital ward, obviously, I cannot deploy cameras, infringe privacy, right? So what did we do? We used LiDAR with AI. So in LiDAR, obviously, you cannot capture your face, cannot capture your body. To LIDAR, you probably use a stick, represent a stick, but using AI to analyze the stick, we can see whether a patient has fallen down. So it's detection solution without using video surveillance. And we did it in some hospital in China. So that is a use case. Other countries, other hospitals. Wow, I never think of that. So this is why the third element of Huawei being involved in China projects that. can bring this success use case overseas is important. So these are the three factors. So the end to end is still important but having said that, we are, based on open standards, we are open to inter operate with our other suppliers.

(44:49) Jeremy Au:

And I think what's interesting as well is that, you always mention the three levels, right? There's an R&D side, I think there's a manufacturing side, and then There's also that frontline, account management and responsibility, which, and responsibility, which, I feel like, that tends to be separated at three different layers in, different ecosystems, but it feels like all three are together.

(45:06) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

It's actually more than three. So the R&D is definitely one by itself. And in fact, Huawei, interestingly, our internal R&D, as I said, we are more than a hundred people in R&D. You know as the internet department name for the R&D? 2012, 2-0-1-2. There was a Hollywood movie 2012. End of the World. So when Huawei created R&D capability, we call it 2012 Lab. That's another culture I failed to mention. The Huawei sense of crisis is very high. Huawei sense of crisis is very high. Everyone knows that we may just disappear tomorrow. We must strive on. So these are interconnected. So this sense of crisis obviously is not one of the four core values, but it's hidden somewhere. And can you imagine when we named the R&D Lab 2012, meaning we must be prepared for end of the world. It's very significant. So there's one layer. Then you have the manufacturing. But in terms of the customer facing, it's more than one layer. It's not just the sales. My organization. In Huawei, different industry has similar organization as me. We are the industry expert that do consulting and planning. We don't sell, depends, sometimes, we sell, sometimes we don't sell because it depends on the country's procurement law. We are here to help customer with the digital transformation journey. I don't come here to just push you the whole stack of technology. We actually sit down with you to analyze your, your country's as is, what is the to be vision. Then from there, what are the new use cases you can offer, whether it's in digital government, digital economy or digital society. So from there, we are even looking at business architecture, not just the technology. So we are the one that drive your business to come up with a blueprint. We are not full fledged consultant. We are not essential. We are not KPMG, but certain extent, we are doing some of this work to help the customer to say, yeah, this is something we need to do and you ultimately lead to a project. So Huawei, you have many groups of us from different industry to do the industry consultancy and planning to help with that high level design.

Then from there, of course, you have sales. But there's another organization that is very strong in Huawei. It's the partner management. So partner management. Huawei is very partner centric. Even though we have the whole stack, we still need a few partners. we need system integrator. We need software developers because we don't touch application. And we still maintain good relationship with KPMG, Deloitte because some customers still need to pay lots of money to do proper consultancy. So we have different partnership. And as part of this partnership, around the world, we have opened a facility called OpenLab. So there's OpenLab in Bangkok, there's OpenLab in Singapore. In OpenLab, literally the whole stack of Huawei technology, hardware, software is there for our partners to test, to test their application on our stack. to optimize it and even go to market together. So some of the, strong partners in Singapore, for example, after it's successfully done, bring them overseas because we know very well when people like me, the industry expert help them to do the business architecture at the end while we can sell everything except the application. So I must have a application partners ready to go to market with us. So it's more than three layers. So the R&D the, manufacturing, the customer facing have different layers.

(47:49) Jeremy Au:

Very interesting. And, you know, you and I mentioned that customer orientation is actually a big part Huawei's culture. And the joke here, of course, is that every company claims to be customer centric. Could you share any examples of how Huawei goes about doing it?

(48:01) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think during, during Ebola, during COVID, these are great examples. That we never say no to customer, we continue. And do you know during COVID, I was there in Africa as well. We have some new products, remember the inverter. And because of the restriction in traveling, some of our experts couldn't travel to the country where inverter was sold. So when the product arrived at the port, we did not have the delivery person to, to, install, but our sales people actually went online to study, to learn all these things and did themselves go and do delivery work. We are prepared to do that.

The other example is in, in one of the major event, I will not mention which event. It was a major event during COVID. In fact, it was planned, but it was delayed. So our products all arrived in a warehouse, in a warehouse. Unfortunately, someone was tested positive. So in this country, the Ministry of Health actually locked down the whole warehouse. But this international event organizers say, Hey, the event is coming up next year. We can't wait. You better do it, better do the installation. No, I know American companies culture. They will probably say, we are not liable. You are the one that locked down, you can't blame us. Our goods did arrive. If you want to take action against us, we also take action against you. But Huawei being customer focused, you know what we did? We shipped in the same set of equipment, second set. Just to make sure we can fulfill the delivery. Huawei go all out to really be customer focused. Whereas, it's just a slogan in most companies, right? And this is another reason why customers trust us and why we continue to enjoy the growth in business. Not just in innovation, our ability to meet the customer requirement, even the technology that was telling you, how do we help the hospital to solve the, problem of dropping the wifi connection. So all these are coming together. It's a great testimony to being customer-focused.

(49:40) Jeremy Au:

Looking forward to the future. You know, like you said, there's a decoupling world as politics and the environment is changing, but obviously grown as well. What do you think are things that huawei will change, and what are the ways you think Huawei will not change?

(49:52) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I think for once, that actually most of us foreigners in Huawei, we are very happy is that because of the action by US. Huawei is forced to be more open because previously we are not, we don't like all this media publicity. We like to do our work, solve the customer problem and make our money. But we actually become more transparent, which I think is good. And I think this change is good. I think one thing at least in the foreseeable future will not change is the investment in R&D in innovation. Because to me, huawei why we can survive all this attack, why our business continue to do well, restriction on technology, including microprocessor, we continue to prevail, to preserve and prevail is because of the investment in R&D I think that remains very important and our invest in r&D is not just in China, it's globally.

So we also have a lot of stakeholders in different countries. The moment we hire so many hundreds of thousands of people, we are helping the in country economy. I think that's important.

(50:43) Jeremy Au:

On that note, could you share any personal stories about time being brave?

(50:46) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

I'm, I'm just a normal person. I'm not a hero and not being brave. Of course, when I was in the police, there were many brave moments, but by my family was it, there was stupid movement. So did I think of the family I do certain action to run after the criminal? This thing, of course, I wouldn't talk about that. But I think is I won't use the word brave, the fact that even during COVID, I took the risk because at the time we were dealing with a lot of unknowns that took the risk to go to Africa, not only that helped a lot with our business, with the public sector customers, they really see that we are there to help, but that also helped a lot the internal, because even my colleagues in Africa, the Chinese, or the local employees, the Chinese, many of them stay on. They did not go back. They could see that a person like me at my age in Huawei standard, I'm considered very old, by the way, that I was willing to be there to help the customer, to help the company, to them that is brave. But to me, you ask me, all the foreigners working in Huawei are brave, especially the non Chinese that stay on the Huawei ,that continue to work for the company to continue to solve customer problem. They are all brave. Of course, we are all making money. We are not into politics. We are just one here to sell you the best innovation, the best technology and money and so on. But to me, as I emphasize, I've seen many foreigners joining Huawei, less than one year, less than six months, they resign, that's why these are all the brave people.

(52:01) Jeremy Au:

Thank you so much for sharing.

(52:02) Mr. Koh Hong-Eng:

Thank you. Thank you Jeremy, for your time. So, hopefully with this, conversation we can give a better lights to many people for them to judge who is huawei, What is Huawei.