In 2020, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei signed an order prohibiting the company from making cars. With October still some way off, Ren has reaffirmed that prohibition for another five years.
Photo by Fan Jianlei
By ZHOU Shuqi
On Friday, REN Zhengfei, the founder and CEO of Chinese telecom giant Huawei, signed an internal order reaffirming that Huawei would not make a car in the next five years.
In 2020, Ren issued an order that the company would not make cars before October of this year. Since that mandate was issued, there have been ceaseless waves of rumors that Huawei is working on a car of its own. With the October horizon still some way off, Ren has left the market with no doubt of his intentions.
This time, the founder has gone so far as to prohibit employees from even talking about making cars. He’s banned the use of the terms “Huawei Wenjie” and “Huawei Aito” in publicity materials for one of Huawei’s EV-making partners, SERES.
Until now, Wenjie and Aito might have been considered flagship projects.
Earlier this month, SERES Aito changed the wording on promotional material to “Huawei Wenjie.” A promotional image and a video featured Huawei Wenjie branding. In the latest publicity material from SERES announcing an upgrade of its HarmonyOS, the term “Huawei Wenjie” still appears.
At the time, Huawei said that Wenjie was a Huawei ecosystem electric vehicle brand, a new business model created by the company. The move appears to have greatly displeased Ren.
In response to questions by Jiemian News, Huawei said it will continue to work on Aito Wenjie cars, and the business model will not change.
Jiemian News visited some Huawei stores in Shanghai, where Wenjie EVs are displayed. Some salesmen said they just received notice from the company that they should stop saying Huawei Wenjie when introducing the model to customers.
"The notice came out of blue," one of them said.
Both Huawei and SERES have publicly claimed that nothing has changed. The two inked a new agreement in February on R&D and establishing a new innovation center. According to the agreement, SERES and Huawei expect to reveal a new flagship model by the end of this year. The vehicle will be mounted with a new EV platform and by 2026, SERES will be able to make and sell a million cars a year.
The trouble may not all be a matter of the boss’s strong aversion to making cars. The Wenjie - range-extended electric mid-sized SUV - appears to have been a serious misfire. In January, sales of the vehicle were only 4,500, half of December’s number.
In February, Huawei suspended auto business COO WANG Jun. CEO of Huawei’s consumer business YU Chengdong is now also in charge of the company’s vehicle side. Yu previously championed the Wenjie project. Perhaps more importantly, in an interview with Jiemian News soon after his appointment, Yu clearly echoed his boss’s sentiments, insisting that, “there is no need for Huawei to make its own cars.”
Being a supplier is far more profitable than opening factories and rolling cars off assembly lines. Changes at the top, however, did nothing to arrest the collapse in sales, with February’s number slipping to 3,500.
Huawei’s troubles neither begin nor end with Wenjie. Earlier this week, GAC Group announced that it was terminating its partnership with the tech giant.
Its new Aion AH8 will not use Huawei’s smart car solution nor cockpit. Another two automakers Arcfox and Avatr who used the Huawei Inside solution face similarly gloomy prospects.
