Huawei Technologies, a formidable player in fields from smartphones to electric vehicles, is also looming large in China’s fragmented robotics industry amid the country’s drive to be a global leader in the field.
The Shenzhen-based telecommunications giant, which is the face of China’s self-sufficiency drive to break US sanctions, last week injected 3 billion yuan (US$413 million) into a subsidiary called Dongguan Jimu Machinery, according to corporate database Qichacha.
The move to increase the capital base of the fully-owned unit to 3.89 billion yuan from 870 million yuan has fanned speculation that Huawei is gearing up to enter the robotics industry. Huawei has not publicly disclosed Jimu’s business activities and declined to comment when contacted on Tuesday.
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Public corporate data showed that Jimu is engaged in electronics component manufacturing.
Jimu is headed by Li Jianguo, an executive director at Huawei and the president of its manufacturing department, according to Qichacha.
Huawei’s increased investment in Jimu comes a month after it opened an embodied artificial intelligence (AI) centre in Shenzhen, focused on integrating AI into physical entities like robots.
The Huawei (Shenzhen) Global Embodied AI Industry Innovation Centre started operations last month. Huawei will use the centre to integrate the embodied AI capabilities of its various teams, and build “key foundational technologies” involving areas such as embodied AI models and computing power, according to the Shenzhen municipal government.
The Huawei embodied AI centre has also signed partnerships with Shenzhen-based robotics companies including Leju Robot and Han’s Robot.
China’s robotics industry is growing rapidly, generating huge demand for components such as chips. According to the World Robotics 2024 report published last month by the International Federation of Robotics, China has surpassed Germany and Japan in the adoption of industrial robots.
Huawei first tested the waters in robotics in April 2022, when it announced a partnership with Shanghai-based Dataa Robotics. The companies would work together to develop multimodal large models and new robotics applications, and Dataa would use Huawei’s Ascend AI computing service, they said.
In March 2024, Leju Robot released robot products powered by Huawei’s home-developed large language model (LLM) Pangu.
Huawei’s push into robotics comes amid nationwide efforts to develop the industry. Several local governments in China released blueprints and policy support measures for the robotics industry this month, with Chongqing pledging up to 10 million yuan (US$1.37 million) in subsidies.
At the five-day World Robot Conference in Beijing in August, Chinese firms showcased more than two dozen humanoid robots, demonstrating abilities that included playing musical instruments, stocking shelves and cooking meals. A humanoid robot named Kuafu-MY, powered by Huawei’s LLM, was launched in May this year.
US-sanctioned Huawei saw its revenue surge in the first nine months of this year thanks to rising smartphone sales in the domestic market. Huawei reported a 29.5 per cent jump in revenue to 585.9 billion yuan in the first three quarters of 2024, up from 452.3 billion yuan in the same period last year, the privately held company said in a filing in November.
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