"China Economic Weekly" reporter Lu Jiangtao
Huawei announced on November 17 that it would sell Honor’s mobile phone business assets as a whole, no longer hold equity, and no longer participate in any operation management and decision-making about Honor.
Huawei issued a statement on its official website stating, "A total of more than 30 Honor agents and distributors jointly initiated this acquisition. This is also a self-help behavior initiated by the Honor-related industry chain."
If you stretch your horizons long enough, you can find that in the history of Huawei's development, Huawei has made similar choices more than once, including the divestiture of Ansheng Electric and H3C, and the recent divestiture of Huawei Marine.
In the repeated divestitures, active or passive, Huawei has kept its core communications business, and has repeatedly turned its heads in crises.
And those business units that have been divested may even achieve a complete industrial chain in the future.
The Whampoa Military Academy in the network energy industry, out of 10 A-share companies with a total market value of 180 billion yuan
There has been such a joke on the Internet. Peking University: half of the students are debating with the other half of the students; People’s University: half of the students are working as secretaries for the other half of the students; Fudan: half of the students acquire and merge the other half of the students’ assets; Normal University: half of the students are tutoring Children of the other half of the classmates; Huadian Emerson Department: Half of the classmates are PK and the other half are classmates.
The ridicule of many prestigious schools is ridiculous, but the "Huadian Emerson Department" is indeed called domestic network energy because its former employees have established or joined many domestic energy industry companies over the years and have become members of the core technology or management team. Whampoa Military Academy in the world.
Huawei sold its "big baby" and reaped the "little quilted jacket" for the winter
In October 2001, the largest market merger in China at that time was finally settled.
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and Emerson Group of the United States jointly announced that Emerson has invested 750 million US dollars to acquire Shenzhen Ansheng Electric Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Ansheng Electric") under Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and promised to further strengthen the acquisition. Ansheng Electric's service support, technical support and product support to Chinese customers bear the existing claims and debts of Ansheng Electric.
According to relevant data, Ansheng Electric, as the largest subsidiary of Huawei at the time, had a total market sales of 2.6 billion yuan in 2001 alone and has 48 national patents.
For such a company with strong profitability, rapid growth, and good market scale, why did Huawei sell it so "cruelly"?
According to media reports at the time, around 2000, the Internet bubble burst and the global telecommunication equipment market was deeply implicated.
At that time, Huawei not only faced full-scale encirclement and suppression by foreign giants in China, but also suffered double losses in CDMA and PHS.
It was at this time that Ren Zhengfei published the famous article "Huawei's Winter".
Huawei believes that at that time it must transfer and divest all product lines that are not related to core business and mainstream equipment, and extract the main energy and resources from non-core businesses in its core areas, so that Huawei’s competitiveness in the field of network communications has become increasingly apparent. In particular, it is advancing to the fields of data communication and mobile communication.
Ansheng Electric is based on power electronics and related control technology, which is different from Huawei’s core development direction. For the long-term development of Ansheng Electric, it is better to sell it.
Emerson stated in the M&A statement that the purchase of Ansheng Electric for more than 6 billion yuan is not only for its good profitability, but more importantly for its valuable technology accumulated in the Chinese telecom market after years of hard work. Strength, production capacity, sales experience and service resources.
It is true that Ansheng Electric’s selling price is not cheap, with a price of US$750 million exceeding 400% of its net assets at the time, but Emerson has gained a lot from it.
After acquiring Ansheng Electric, Emerson integrated its own energy system business and the China business of another subsidiary Liberty into a new company, Emerson Network Energy.
Relying on Huawei's painstaking efforts in the power supply field over the past ten years, Emerson Network Power has risen rapidly, not only becoming the overlord in the field of uninterruptible power supply (UPS), but also continuing to create good financial returns for the parent company.
In 2016, Emerson sold its subsidiary Emerson Network Power to Platinum Asset Management and its partner investors for US$4 billion.
Huawei, on the other hand, relied on this money to tide over the difficulties, and at the same time, when the market was generally depressed, it was aggressively expanding overseas markets.
It is precisely this time that Huawei has sold its "big beloved baby", but has harvested the "little quilted jacket" for the winter, and has successfully survived the industry winter.
Achieved 10 A-share listed companies with a total market value of over 180 billion yuan
The impact of Huawei's divestiture of Ansheng Electric is far more than that.
Many of the original technical backbones of Ansheng Electric have become the gold-collar workers of the foreign company Emerson.
A few years later, some of them chose to leave their jobs and start their own businesses. This is the famous "Huadian Emerson Entrepreneurship Department" in the power electronics and industrial control fields.
The former employee of Huawei Electric (the predecessor of Ansheng Electric, the same below) is the operator of the WeChat public account "Power Old Generation" and is also a witness to the rise of the Huadian-Emerson system.
This Huawei veteran joined Huawei Electric in 1997 and then joined Emerson Network Power.
According to statistics from Dai Xin News Agency, there are currently 10 A-share listed companies whose founders or core technical teams come from the Huadian-Emerson group.
Relevant information shows that the founder of Inovance Technology (300124.SZ) is Zhu Xingming, and he was the director of Huawei's electrical product line before starting his business.
The company positions itself as a technology company serving mid-to-high-end equipment manufacturers. It has grown into an industrial automation giant with a market value of more than 130 billion yuan. It is also the A-share listed company with the highest market value out of Huadian-Emerson.
In 2019, Inovance Technology's frequency converter products ranked the top three in the Chinese market; the servo system ranked the top five in the Chinese market; the market share of frequency converters and servo system products ranked first among domestic brands.
Lanhai Huateng (300484.SZ) successfully landed on the GEM in 2016. Its controlling shareholders and actual controllers Qiu Wenyuan and Xu Xuehai are also from Huadian-Emerson. The company’s products mainly include inverters, servo drives and systems, and electric vehicle motors. Controllers, etc., currently have a total market value of about 3.7 billion yuan.
INVT (002334.SZ), with a current market value of about 4.1 billion yuan, was initiated in 2002 by Huang Shenli of the General Transmission Department, but its core technical team is a digital technical talent introduced from Huadian-Emerson in 2006, which is also INVT's galloping industry. A sharp sword of automation arena.
INVT focuses on the two major areas of industrial automation and energy and power, and provides users with the most valuable products and solutions. Relying on power electronics, automatic control, and information technology, its business covers industrial automation, new energy vehicles, network energy and rail transit.
According to a reporter from China Economic Weekly, there are also many A-share listed companies whose founders are from Huadian Emerson Department, or the core technical team is from Huadian Emerson Department: including Zhongheng Electric, one of the earliest companies engaged in the research and development of high-frequency switching power supply technology in China (002364.SZ) (current market value is about 5.4 billion yuan); Dinghan Technology (300011.SZ) specializing in the research and development, production, sales, installation and maintenance of rail transit power systems (current total market value is about 4 billion yuan); Based on power electronics and related control technology, it focuses on the conversion, control and application of electrical energy. Its products cover industrial power supplies, industrial automation, smart home appliance electronic control, new energy vehicles and rail transit, etc. Megmeet (002851.SZ) (Currently, the total market value is about 18 billion yuan); A leading domestic provider of precision temperature control and energy-saving equipment, Yingwei is committed to providing solutions for cloud computing data centers, communication networks, Internet of Things infrastructure and various professional environmental control fields Gram (002837.SZ) (currently the total market value is about 6.4 billion yuan); the main business includes the research and development, manufacturing, sales and service of power electronic equipment such as wind power converters, solar photovoltaic inverters, general and engineering inverters Hewang Electric (603063.SH) (current total market value is about 6.2 billion yuan); Shenghong shares (300693.SZ), which focuses on power electronics technology, new energy and battery formation testing technology (current total market value is about 3.7 billion yuan); Xinrui Technology (300745.SZ), which focuses on the research and development, production and sales of on-board power supplies for new energy vehicles, and mainly provides comprehensive solutions for on-board power supplies for the new energy vehicle industry (currently has a total market value of about 3 billion yuan).
The total market value of the above 10 A-share companies alone exceeds 180 billion yuan.
In addition, the companies listed on the New Third Board with strong Huadian-Emerson genes include: Gtech (836023), Aikesai (832062), Huasu Electric (430259), Ai Luowei (835554), Hydson (870945), Kelie Technology (832432), Longdian Electric (870314), etc.
Because of this, some media commented that Huawei’s divestiture of assets many years ago unintentionally promoted the development of an entire industry in China.
H3C, which was once able to challenge Cisco, is now the "money printing machine" of Tsinghua Unigroup
New H3C, the full name of H3C Group Co., Ltd., is a company with comprehensive capabilities in computing, storage, network, 5G, security and other comprehensive digital infrastructure. Currently, R&D personnel account for more than 50%, and the total number of patent applications exceeds 11,000. And more than 90% of them are invention patents.
In the first half of 2020, Xinhua III's revenue and net profit were 16.754 billion yuan and 1.279 billion yuan, respectively.
It is such a company that can compete with industry giants such as Cisco, Inspur, and Huawei in many fields, but its name is a little weird, because Xin H3C has a deep relationship with Huawei and 3COM.
Since its establishment, the company's controlling rights have changed hands several times, and finally became an important subsidiary in the A-share listed company Ziguang Co., Ltd. (000938.SZ) system.
Born in distress, was a Cisco competitor
Cisco (Cisco) used to be synonymous with network infrastructure and has a special status in the history of the development of the Internet. At one time, no one could do without its switches and routers.
At the height of the dotcom bubble, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a stock market value of more than $500 billion.
For such a powerful Cisco, if there are opponents that make him feel uneasy, then this opponent is H3C, the predecessor of H3C.
H3C, which was only established in 2003, has been able to occupy a certain share in the global switch market by 2011 and has shown a steady growth momentum.
Although Cisco still has an absolute advantage at this time, H3C, which has only 8 years of history at the time, has fulfilled the goal of its CEO Zheng Shusheng: "Each company has its own specialty. This specialty is focus. H3C hopes Based on the IT field, it has become the world's second choice besides Cisco."
By 2014, H3C had 8,000 employees, and many businesses firmly occupied the first place in the Chinese market.
According to data, in the early days of its establishment, H3C was absolutely controlled by Huawei and was born out of Huawei's Data Communications Department.
In November 2003, 3Com (a major competitor of Cisco) acquired 49% of H3C through allotment.
This is also the time when the lawsuit between Huawei and Cisco is intractable.
In June 2002, Huawei made its first official appearance at the telecommunications equipment exhibition held in Atlanta, USA. The performance of its data products was comparable to that of Cisco products, but the price was 20% to 50% lower than its rivals.
In mid-December 2002, Cisco’s global vice president came to Shenzhen, China from the United States, and formally raised the issue of Huawei’s infringement of Cisco’s intellectual property rights and filed a lawsuit in early 2003.
On January 23, 2003, Cisco filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court of the Eastern District of Texas, accusing Huawei and its US subsidiary Future Wei of embezzling some of Cisco's IOS (Internet Operating System) source code and applying it to the operating system of its Quidway routers and switches. At least 5 infringements of Cisco patents occurred.
In July 2004, the two parties reached a final settlement agreement to terminate their respective litigation and counter-claims.
According to media reports, the establishment of H3C played a significant role in the settlement of the lawsuit between Huawei and Cisco.
In the case between Huawei and Cisco, the then CEO of 3Com, Bruce Claflin, also appeared in court to testify and provided evidence in favor of Huawei.
After reconciling the lawsuit with Cisco, Huawei transferred 2% of H3C’s shares to 3Com in early 2006, and then sold its 49% stake in H3C to 3Com in March 2007. The transfer price is US$882 million.
After several changes of hands, it eventually became a Chinese holding company
What is quite dramatic is that the US$882 million from the sale of H3C’s 49% equity gave Huawei greater capital to successfully tide over the 2008 financial crisis that started in the United States and swept the audience. However, 3Com has It was acquired by HP for US$2.7 billion in 2009, and ultimately failed to survive the crisis.
After the completion of the acquisition, H3C also naturally entered the HP family.
After becoming a member of the HP system, H3C has maintained a good momentum of development, and under HP's sales and service channels, H3C’s overseas market share has also grown very fast.
However, after HP took over, it was not pleasant to get along with the original management of H3C. This was the result of the acquisition of 51% of H3C by Ziguang.
In May 2015, Tsinghua Unigroup announced that it intends to initiate an acquisition from H3C Holdings Ltd, a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard Company, at a price of no less than 2.5 billion U.S. dollars. The main target is its 51% holding of H3C in Hong Kong. Of shares.
It is worth noting that the "Hong Kong H3C" at this time is different from the previous HP subsidiary H3C. Compared with the latter, the former has more assets such as HP server business, which is officially "Xin H3C".
According to the announcement of Unigroup at the time, HP will complete the business integration of Hong Kong H3C before the delivery of the 51% equity of H3C Hong Kong, and transfer its business and assets related to server and storage hardware product sales, technical services, and Kunming. Transfer 100% equity of Haisoft and 100% equity of Tianjin Hewlett-Packard to Hong Kong Huasan.
On May 4, 2016, Tsinghua Unigroup announced that it has completed the delivery procedures for the 51% equity of H3C Communication Technology Co., Ltd., and H3C is officially integrated into "Xin H3C" and included in the scope of the consolidated statement of Tsinghua Unigroup.
Ziguang also stated that Xin H3C will rely on Ziguang’s diversified resources, financial strength and scientific research advantages to promote its own development. At the same time, its leading advantages in global enterprise networks, cloud computing, big interconnection, hyper-converged architecture, storage and other markets can also help. Tsinghua Unigroup accelerates its march toward the world's most comprehensive and leading IT service platform enterprise.
New H3C has indeed lived up to Ziguang’s expectations and has quickly become the company’s main source of profit and performance growth.
The semi-annual report shows that in the first half of 2020, Ziguang Co., Ltd. realized operating income of 25.55 billion yuan and realized net profit of 881 million yuan attributable to shareholders of the parent company, an increase of 11.66% and 4.21% respectively.
In the first half of this year, H3C achieved revenue and net profit of 16.754 billion yuan and 1.279 billion yuan respectively.
It can be seen that Xin H3C has now become the most important source of income for Unisplendour. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the "money printing machine" of Unisplendour.
New H3C, born out of Huawei, has undergone many changes of status and finally became a Chinese-owned company.
The most legendary thing is that although the controlling rights have changed hands several times, the value of Xin H3C has been sold higher and higher, and its business does not seem to be affected. Instead, it has grown bigger and bigger until it can become a partner with Cisco, Companies that compete with domestic and foreign industry giants such as Inspur and Huawei.
Huawei Marine, the world's fourth largest, helps Hengtong Optoelectronics "compete" with the Big Three overseas
At the beginning of November 2020, the submarine cable business brand of Huawei Ocean Networks Co., Ltd. was switched to Huahai Communication Technology Co., Ltd., and a new corporate identity image was launched on November 3, 2020.
The reason for this brand switch is that the control of Huawei Ocean Network (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Huawei Ocean") has changed ownership, and Hengtong Optoelectronics (600487.SH) has become the fourth-ranked undersea company in the world. The new major shareholder of the optical cable company.
In this transaction, Huawei not only received 301 million yuan in cash, but also became the third largest shareholder of Hengtong Optoelectronics with 47,641,300 shares.
Based on the closing price on November 19, the market value of this part of the stock is about 710 million yuan.
Huawei reluctantly cuts love and sells Huawei Marine
According to a research report of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, 40% of the world's submarine cables were constructed before 2000 and have gradually entered the end of the submarine cable life cycle.
In the next few years, with the in-depth promotion of the global digital economy and the advent of the era of big data, the growth of international Internet traffic will continue to increase, the demand for data center interconnection and Internet bandwidth will continue to grow, and the global submarine cable will enter a period of replacement of old and new. This will trigger another peak in international submarine cable construction.
The main body of Huawei's submarine cable business is Huawei Marine. This short-established company has won more than 10% of the global market share by virtue of its advanced technology and has been well received by customers.
The submarine cable business has a broad market space, and Huawei Marine's prospects are also promising. When it should have been promising, Huawei had to reluctantly cut the meat and sold Huawei Marine to Hengtong Optoelectronics.
The transaction between Huawei and Hengtong Optoelectronics began in the first half of last year.
At that time, due to changes in the international environment, the implementation of Huawei's overseas orders was not optimistic.
In response to pressure, Huawei is determined to sell Huawei Marine.
In order to obtain a 51% stake in Huawei Marine from Huawei, Hengtong Optoelectronics launched a plan to acquire Huawei Marine equity through a transaction of issuing shares and paying cash in June 2019.
According to Hengtong Optoelectronics, the transaction price was 1.004 billion yuan.
Among them, Hengtong Optoelectronics non-publicly issued 47,641,300 shares to Huawei, and paid 301 million yuan in cash to it.
With the completion of the transfer of the underlying assets of the transaction at the beginning of this year, Hengtong Optoelectronics also "buy" itself into "Huawei concept stocks" through asset acquisitions.
It is worth noting that Hengtong Optoelectronics is not satisfied with only holding 51% of Huawei Marine.
On May 14, 2020, a related party of Hengtong Optoelectronics, Hengtong Technology (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Hengtong Group, acquired 30% of Huawei Marine.
Hengtong Optoelectronics takes over and challenges the Big Three overseas
Relevant information shows that Huawei Marine was established in January 2008, and its marine business is mainly carried out through Tianjin Huahai, which it holds 100% of its shares.
The company is positioned as a submarine cable communication network construction solution provider, and its customer groups are mainly telecom operators in countries/regions around the world, Internet companies that need large-capacity data transmission, or companies that want to invest in submarine cable networks.
Its main business revenues for 2017, 2018, and January-June 2019 were 1.65 billion yuan, 1.825 billion yuan, and 616 million yuan, respectively.
As the other party to this transaction, Hengtong Optoelectronics is one of the largest comprehensive information and energy network service providers in China with the most complete industrial chain. Its main business covers two major industries: optical communications and smart grid transmission, providing customers with full value Chain integration service.
In fact, Hengtong Optoelectronics began to invest in the submarine cable business in 2009. It has received orders for submarine optical cables in the international marine market and has exceeded 10,000 kilometers. It has entered the international submarine optical cable market system and has become one of the internationally renowned submarine cable manufacturers. .
While the submarine cable manufacturing industry has a certain scale, the company is also actively deploying international submarine cable operations. Currently, it is advancing the construction of the PEACE transoceanic submarine cable communication system operation project, extending the industrial chain from submarine optical cable manufacturing to submarine optical cable system operation .
Hengtong Optoelectronics' 2019 semi-annual report shows that its core business of marine communications and energy interconnection segments has grown rapidly, effectively offsetting the impact of the decline in revenue from the communications network segment.
For this reason, in the opinion of industry insiders, if Huawei has to divest Huawei Marine, then Hengtong Optoelectronics will be one of the best takeover parties. Through the acquisition of Huawei Marine, Hengtong Optoelectronics can quickly expand its share in the submarine cable market, and Acquired Huawei Marine's more than 10 years of submarine cable construction experience and industry chain resources.
At present, the major companies engaged in the construction of submarine cable communication networks in the world are SubCom, Nokia/ASN, NEC and Huawei Marine.
Subcom, ASN, and NEC entered the field of submarine cable communications earlier and have a first-mover advantage. The submarine cable communications market before 2008 has long been monopolized by these three giants.
In the field of submarine cable communications, Chinese companies are a new force.
Huawei Marine, which was established in January 2008, is now the world's fourth largest submarine cable engineering company, with a global market share of more than 10%.
Therefore, a brokerage research report analyzes that, for Hengtong Optoelectronics, the addition of Huawei Marine has made the company's marine business even more powerful.
Through the integration of Huawei Marine and the company's existing submarine cable business, Hengtong Optoelectronics has initially possessed the strength to compete with the international Big Three.