Cellphone city
Julie Iles takes a tour of Huawei’s mammoth Chinese campus, home to about 100,000 workers.
Huawei’s mega-factory
"In China, working here is every graduate's dream." Louie Hu, Huawei employee
In China, working at Huawei’s Shenzhen campus is considered by IT nerds to be ‘‘every graduate’s dream’’. The Shenzhen base is a huge facility. The Chinese tech giant has 180,000 employees around the world but an estimated 100,000 of them work at the campus.
These workers, most of them male, eat, sleep and work at the lakeside campus, which is equipped with two hospitals, a hotel, swimming pools, volley ball courts, and restaurants.
While smartphone development is only ten per cent of Huawei’s global business, Huawei smartphones make up almost a third of our local cellphone market. The company also develops the technology that routes almost every call made from a New Zealand cellphone.
In a city of 20 million people, the campus is a sprawling green spot amidst the city’s 100-storey skyscrapers.
At the company’s research and development lab, smartphones are put in ovens and baked, tumbled in rotating tubes, twisted in metal clamps, and dropped from metrehigh vices that released the phone repeatedly so it falls precisely on its different sides.
The lab smells strongly of burning glue, a pregnant worker waves her arm in front of her face as she passes the ovens where the smell is the strongest.
‘‘It always smells like this, very bad.’’ she says.
Some ovens swing in temperature from minus 40C to 80C so that the deterioration of the components of the smartphones can be tracked and recorded, others keep them in high humidity for weeks.
Looking inside some ovens is prohibited for visitors, especially journalists, where the next generation of Huawei smartphone technology is being slowly cooked.
At another station the side buttons on phones are pushed a million times by robotic arms – the equivalent of pushing the side button on your phone more than 2700 times a day for a year – and charging cords inserted, wiggled and removed hundreds of thousands of times.
Each precinct has its own eateries, architectural style, and workers, with billions of dollars more development on the areas well underway.
Outside the lab, several 20-storey buildings have been gutted for new office developments.
Further inside the campus, a multi-billion dollar Spanish-style renovation of the visitor centre is underway.
The Huawei’s emphasis on 12th to 19th century architecture is unusual for tech giants, with other international giants like Apple and Google preferring more sleek, modern designs.
When the renovations were announced, Huawei was widely criticised for its ‘‘shanzhai,’’ or copycat architecture, which some said was a backwards move for a forward-facing company.
The tour continues past founder Ren Zhenghei’s European-style office building, where he meets with company clients, despite retiring as chief executive.
Ren handed over the reins in 2014, and the chief executive position now rotates among three top executives.
The current boss, Richard Yu took over this month, in time for the companies latest tech release, its Mate 10 smartphone series.
In a pond outside Ren’s office, a black swan imported from Australia ducks its head into a crate filled with food.
The company is privately owned and likely to stay that way, which is quite unusual for a tech giant that could make billions in a sharemarket listing.
Ren owns almost 2 per cent of the multi-billion dollar company, while the rest was sold to a pool of 85,000 employees.
In one precinct’s food court, several tables are marked with a red light indicating they are reserved, with large platters of food awaiting hungry workers who had ordered in advance through social media app WeChat.
One worker jokes he has gained 15 kilograms ksince starting at the company.
One area has a 117-classroom training facility that hosts a few Auckland University of Technology graduates each year as part of the company’s partnership with the university.
Huawei employee Louie Hu descibes his life thus: ’’In China, working here is every graduates dream.’’
Though the heart of Huawei is settled in Shenzhen, it continues to invest in the future of New Zealand telecommunications industry.
Huawei is already rooted in the New Zealand telecom market through partnerships with local companies, and announced an ‘‘aspirational’’ plan to spend $400 million here over the next five years.
A spokesman said in March the company intended to build a cloud-computing data centre – possibly in connection with a local partner – in New Zealand in about two years, and would expand its research centre in Wellington and open another in Christchurch.
The company has supplied and partly-financed 2degrees’ mobile network and in 2015 provided the technology for Vodafone’s $22m cable broadband upgrades in Wellington and Christchurch.
Last year, Spark began trials in Christchurch of 4.5G cell-site technology using Huawei equipment.
Chorus also buys a small amount of Huawei equipment for its rural networks. *Julie Iles travelled to Shenzhen with the assistance of Huawei.