February 2024
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HOW CHINA MADE A DIFFERENCE THIS MONTH
?“A CHINESE MOBILE WORLD”
?End of February, I went to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I last visited MWC 20 years ago when it was still hosted in Cannes. It was called GSM World Congress back then, which made this event European by design.
?I recall Chinese vendors like Huawei and ZTE overloading their mid-sized booths with bulky telecommunication equipment, leaving almost no room for any visitors. Mobile phones were all Western and Japanese. Today, the Chinese brands are taking center stage with the most advanced innovation, spectacular designs, coolest gadgets and full-featured devices.
?But there was more. The size of the Chinese booths. Huawei’s booth exceeded anything you have ever seen. It occupied 9000 sq. meters right near the entrance. That is bigger than FC Barcelona’s football field. I dare not to imagine what this must have cost. But one thing was crystal clear: Huawei is Back!
MWC had more than 300 Chinese brands participating, which is twice as much as in 2023. What I first noticed was how different Asian booths were built. For example, Nokia, IBM or Microsoft had 80% of their booth closed off to the public, while the brands like Samsung, ZTE or Honor had 80% of their booth open to the general public. Western brands showed cool ads and held panel debates, while Chinese brands displayed cool products and engaged in visitor participation.
?The talk of the town was all about AI. It felt more like an AI world congress than a Mobile world congress. But where Asian brands like iFlytek, China Mobile or MediaTek were letting people experience what AI and Generative AI could mean to business or consumers, Western brands seemed more interested to warn, discuss and excite about disruption of AI.
?The West attempted to reach the brain, the Chinese the heart. The West tries to humanize AI. the Chinese dream how humans could live with AI. The West seeks to manage the future of AI, the Chinese trying to create it.
?The Chinese innovations that left a deep emotion on me were foremost because of their cool design, emotional smarts and relevance towards a sustainable world.
?The Chinese products I was totally sold on were Lenovo’s transparent laptop screen and Xiaomi’s connected SU7 electrical car. Visitors were drawn to these two products to take selfies due to their elegant, luxurious yet subtle design. China clearly moved on from made-in-China to designed-in-China. What was striking was to witness how the latest Chinese innovations resonated well with global consumers.
Three Chinese gadgets worth mentioning are Lenovo’s bracelet phone, ZTEs foldable post-in note size phone, as well as the world’s first 5G AI eye-wear free 3D tablet from ZTE. ?
But the Chinese brand that left the deepest impression on me was Honor. As you might know, Huawei sold its cell phone business to Honor in 2020 due to US restrictions to use Android and 5G chips in its phones. Honor, based in Hong Kong is not restricted, and embodies now - with a delay - what Huawei’s smartphones could have become.
?Honor has made their AI smartphone brand a lifestyle brand – like Apple – an extension of who you are. Honor is also targeting the next generation consumers, where smartphones are accessories to fit your personal brand. I loved their luxury mini-handbag style phone, that has a background wallpaper that matches your clothes called V Purse. But I truly fell in love with the Porsche design of Magic V2 – which unfolds to slimmest foldable screen with unrivaled photography capabilities.
But MWC is less about consumer devices than about communication equipment. The 5.5G telecommunication equipment from Huawei was of another planet. Not only due to its 10x performance compared to 5G with its smart network and antenna inventions – which I could not take close-up pictures of - but mostly how it goes hand-in-hand with energy efficiencies.
I write more about this in my first news topic below.
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CHINESE INNOVATION NEWS – FEBRUARY 2024
1.?Huawei unveils eight 5.5G innovation practices
2. CATL, BYD, others unite in China for solid-state battery breakthrough
3. China builds up electric power in western deserts equal to half US capacity
4. Biotech is the new focus in US-China tech rivalry
5. Saudi Arabia steps up demands in tech deals with China
6. Wuxi wants to be the Silicon Valley of chiplets
7. China Generative AI updates February 2024
(Click the links in titles below to read a larger news article on each topic)
When visiting Huawei’s booth at Mobile World Congress, at first, I felt 5.5G is a marketing term to boost the interest to buy Huawei’s 5G equipment. But after listening carefully I have to review my perception. The 5.5G standard has a much better guarantee of the bandwidth with higher capacity and antenna design that allows more users simultaneously to get access to higher bandwidth applications like 3D screens and AR/VR experience. Where 5G mostly overpromised the 1Gbps, 5.5G is closing in to achieving 10 Gbps with multi-antenna smart technologies. With new designs overlaying existing antennas and enhancing the elements, a capacity increase and a dual-or triple band antenna can be achieved within the same antenna box, benefitting cost and power consumption.
?Two concepts that caught my eye, were the 0Bit, 0Watt concept and the RedCap IoT. 0Bit, 0Watt reduces the energy consumption of a device or antenna that is not transceiving signals theoretically down to zero, waking it up when needed. RedCap (Reduced Capability) tags are passive tags without battery or extreme low power IoT chips connected in a network. Huawei does not make the tags, but enables them with 5.5G. That way, hundreds of RedCap IoT tags can be put in a warehouse, and can be woken up when you need to get an inventory report. Dirt cheap and energy low.
?Aiming to build a supply chain for solid-state batteries by 2030, China's battery and car makers and academia such as CATL, CALB, BYD, NIO ,and others have all united under a government-led consortium called CASIP to commercialize solid-state batteries. The aim is for Chinese companies to develop and manufacture solid-state batteries to compete globally. Six of the top 10 automotive battery makers globally are taking part in the CASIP initiative, showcasing China's "all-star" lineup.
Today, Japanese manufacturers like Toyota and Nissan have an edge in solid-state batteries, while VW and BMW are working with battery startups in US. Solid-state batteries have the potential to change the balance of power in an industry led by China’s Lithium based battery producers now. Toyota holds over 1,300 patents for solid-state batteries, and is confident in their commercial production after 2030. Chinese battery companies on the other hand have fewer than 100 solid-state battery patents. China now intends to speed up its development of solid-state batteries, hence the creation of the collaborative innovation platform CASIP. ?
?In the vast expanse of the Gobi and other deserts in northwestern China, spanning 3 million sq km, a “world-leading” electricity production and transmission network is taking shape. The area is larger than India and regarded as one of the most underdeveloped, impoverished and sparse populated regions in China. Long ago, Chinese rocket scientist Qian Xuesen envisioned harnessing vast renewable energy resources of the desert to power the nation.
?Today, the region is the source of 60 per cent of China’s solar energy and one-third of its wind power. The existing installed capacity for power generation in northwestern China is about 500 gigawatts, of which 230 GW consisting solely of renewable energy, with half of that electricity transmitted over 10 ultra high-voltage (UHV) direct current transmission lines spanning thousands of kilometers to the densely populated eastern coastal provinces.
?In comparison, all United States power plants combined produced about 1,100GW at the end of 2022, with 22% or 242 GW from renewable sources – about the same as from this region alone in China. China’s northwest power grid has also surpassed the EU in core renewable energy utilization indicators.
If all deserts on Earth were blanketed with solar panels and wind turbines, the electricity generated would dwarf existing human needs. But transmitting huge amounts of electricity over vast distances is a daunting goal and traditional grids cannot handle the wild fluctuations of renewable energy. Yet, China has managed to build the world’s most advanced UHV long-distance direct current transmission lines, effectively reducing power loss during the long-distance transmission.
Humanity has been able to turn sand into glass and later into silicon to advance all our lives. Why not now turn the world’s vast deserts of sand into sources of clean energy for all to use?
领英推荐
Biotech is being considered as one of the most lucrative arenas these days. Biology is the last domain of “engineerable science", poised to become one of the greatest creators of economic value in the 21st century. Building the infrastructure to support such biotech ambitions is being recognized by all major powers as a linchpin of national security and economic strategy. As a result, Beijing's biotech ambitions are getting attention in Washington. We can expect another heated US-China tech war over biotech moving forward.
?The genomic sequencing behemoth BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute) will become the novel Western symbol of a ‘malicious’ China. Why BGI? All nations realize they need to invest in biosecurity and biotech, but most need to buy much of it from somewhere else. BGI and its affiliates on the other hand offer an array of integrated products and services, including DNA sequencing machines, mass spectrometry of proteins, diagnostic tests, reagents, and data storage and management. That kind of one-stop shopping isn't available from any other company. Nobody has effectively been able to compete at scale with BGI on price either.
?Again, we are asking the wrong question! The question is not whether BGI will one day be able to collect our DNA data to control our markets, supply chains and maybe even people. The real question is why the West has not been able to keep up with BGI to understand what genes do to create new forms of medicines, crops and materials – and build the supply chains to sell it cheaply. The answer is one we don’t want to hear: The Western pharma industry is profit driven first, not citizen driven like BGI – a mission needed to thrive in a ‘socialist’ country like China.
Saudi Arabia is mandating that leading Chinese technology companies invest in the Gulf kingdom in return for huge deals, as it leverages its petrodollar wealth to boost its domestic tech industry. The kingdom’s hunt for global tech companies to help upgrade its economy and diversify away from oil has coincided with a more hostile US and EU markets towards China and a slower domestic economy in China. Chinese companies have secured deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Saudi Arabia over the past three years, in exchange for setting up joint ventures in the country. Alibaba Cloud entered the Saudi market in 2022 through a joint venture with the Saudi Telecom Group, which has also partnered with Huawei on 5G projects. AI leader SenseTime has won a contract for the kingdom’s ambitious project to build a futuristic megacity Neom. Chinese autonomous driving group Pony.ai raised $100mn from the Neom Investment Fund.
?Saudi investors are applying increasingly stringent requirements to fund deals. In some cases, Chinese companies have to share IP and technical expertise with their new Saudi partners, including training their own local talent. Saudi is copying an old tech-for-market China recipe from decades ago.
?Saudi Arabia is also courting foreign tech companies to develop its nascent AI industry, “cherry-picking” between the best companies from Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. Late last year, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology released AceGPT, an Arabic-focused large language model built in collaboration with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data. Chinese companies are usually more open to intellectual property transfer than European and US companies, which have very strict policies on this. But China has one more advantage. In November, Saudi Arabia signed a local currency swap agreement with China worth about $7bn. China is the largest customer of Saudi oil, part of which is settled in renminbi. The kingdom is sitting on a growing pile of renminbi from selling oil to China. One way to spend it well is on Chinese goods and services.
?The Middle-East is the new Western market for China. Chinese tech is the new oil for the Middle-East.
?Chiplets - the new chipmaking approach that breaks down chips into independent modules to reduce design costs and improve computing performance - can help China develop more powerful chips despite US government sanctions.
?Instead of endlessly trying to cram more transistors into one chip, the chiplet approach proposes that the functions of a chip can be separated into several smaller devices, and each component could be easier to make than a powerful single-piece chip. Compared with traditional chips, chiplets are more accommodating of less-advanced manufacturing capabilities, but they require more sophisticated packaging techniques to ensure that different modules can work together seamlessly.
Wuxi is a medium-sized city with a long history since the ‘60s in the semiconductor sector. Wuxi has over 600 chip companies and is China’s center of chip packaging - the final steps in the assembly process, like integrating the silicon part with its plastic case and testing the chip’s performance. JCET, founded in Wuxi, is the third-largest chip packaging company in the world and the largest of its kind in China.
Wuxi is a great example of China’s hidden role in the global semiconductor industry: relative to sectors like chip design and manufacturing, packaging is much more labor intensive and less high profile as investment. That’s why there’s basically no packaging capability left in Western countries, and why places like Wuxi usually fly under everyone’s radar.
?Wuxi wants to become the “Chiplet Valley.” Or maybe we should call Wuxi the “Chipmunk IC Valley” eating away at US chip sanctions package by package.
7.???? China Generative AI updates
?Here are some of the China newsflashes of February on Generative AI.
?Computer vision engineers with GenAI skills can command salaries of USD 66,700, two-thirds higher than their peers without such knowledge. The number of jobs listings on Liepin demanding GenAI skills increased by more than 179 per cent year on year in the first 10 months of 2023. But, for every five new jobs in AI in China, there are only two qualified workers in the market
?Baidu posted revenue of US$4.9 billion for the quarter, up 6 per cent year on year. As of December, about 26,000 enterprises were actively monthly users of Ernie Bot, up 150 per cent over the previous quarter. Ernie Bot currently handles more than 50 million queries every day, up 190 per cent from the previous quarter.
Out of a team of thirteen, two Chinese developers (Jing Li and Ricky Wang Yu) involved in building Sora, the newly released text-to-video generator from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, have received acclaim on the mainland for their efforts. The fact that China praises them is the real story here: The fact that Chinese help build Sora is something China is proud of.
A key contributor to Google’s VideoPoet video generation technology (Jiang Lu) has joined TikTok owner ByteDance. Last November, ByteDance introduced PixelDance, but it cannot compare to Sora’s capabilities. In early February, ByteDance unveiled Boximator, a video motion control tool to assist in video generation, but the technology is still in its infancy.
Lenovo Group, the world’s largest personal computer (PC) maker, is doubling down on various AI initiatives, planning to release its first-generation AI PCs before the summer, likely with Baidu’s GenAI technology. This reflects a shift in demand to machines that can run generative AI tasks locally with specific AI semiconductors as users require devices designed for more creativity and productivity.
Beijing-based Moonshot AI, known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian, raised more than US$1 billion in a new funding round. This is the largest single financing raised by a Chinese AI start-up since ChatGPT was released. Their smart chatbot Kimi Chat is built on its ‘Moonshot LLM’, which can process as many as 200,000 Chinese characters in a context window. ?
Meizu - the fifth largest global smartphone vendor - acquired in 2022 by carmaker Geely, announced that it will terminate new projects on traditional smartphones to pursue an “all in AI” strategy over the next three years. Meizu will build an ecosystem to fully open its AI devices to leading global LLM providers, including OpenAI.
Chinese AI company iFlytek aims to leverage its edge in LLM to empower more than 1 million smart devices and reached over one hundred million independent software users in 2024. I visited their booth at Mobile World Congress, and was truly impressed by their Generative AI driven customer experience tools.
Chinese companies have been buying a huge stockpile of Nvidia AI chips that could allow them to keep up with US sanctions at least a couple more generations. However, the US argument goes that Nvidia is releasing next-generation AI chips so quickly it will make the Chinese AI chip asset build up ineffective soon. Interesting viewpoint.?
A Chinese AI firm called Super Brain built a technology that was able to create basic avatars that are capable to mimic the thinking and speech patterns of deceased people. They so far helped thousands of families digitally revive their dearly departed from as little as 30 seconds of audiovisual material. Super brain provides three kinds of service: AI healing would clone voices to build a chatbox and the digital portrait provided a profile image to support an intelligent speech function, as well as a 3D digital human model. Fees start from USD$ 700
?If you know of any other breaking China innovation news from February that I missed, do let me know so I can add it in next month’s newsletter!
?STAY TUNED!
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Professor "Leading & Living Innovation", Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management
8 个月Super insightful - a big thanks and compliments, Pascal Coppens!
Exciting read! Can't wait to dive into all the innovation insights.