Huawei Investing Heavily in R&D for 'Disruptive' Technologies

Huawei might not be a phone manufacturer that you hear about every day, but the Chinese giant is hoping to change that with investment into “disruptive’ technologies like touch-free phones and infinite cloud storage. The company has revealed that it plans on spending 20% more on R&D this year.

Said John Roose, the general manager for the North American branch of Huawei:

"We are focused on disruptive technology and taking interesting ideas and turning them into something exciting... What if you use the camera of a tablet or a smartphone and use it to capture the visualization of your hands? So imagine instead of touching a smartphone, you can actually have a three-dimensional interaction with it."

Huawei is better known for its telecom infrastructure hardware. But the company has been rapidly expanding its consumer market thanks to a series of cheap but stellar Android phones that were more than able to challenge their big brand competition. Huawei has become a byword for bargain quality.

And the company is not small. Last year alone, the company spent $3.76 billion on R&D, a move which resulted in 11,000 new employees for that department alone. This year the company plans on investing $4.5 billion into R&D. The company sold more than 20 million smartphones last year. This year, however, they are hoping to move even more; the current goal is to sell 60 million.

The company isn’t just working on smartphones that read your hand movements rather than your touches, however. They have also partnered with CERN to investigate new information storage techniques. The partnership means Huawei’s existing storage cloud is being used to store CERN’s 15,360 TB it collects every year.

Huawei thinks that the research they are conducting could revolutionize storage. The idea is that people could store as much as they want, and the company would only charge when you pull down that data from the cloud. Said Roose:

"If we are successful, which I think we will be, it literally could change the economics of storage by an order of a magnitude... Of all the projects, and there are lots of good projects, that is the one that could have a profound impact on the market.”

ComputerWorld Photo by : Wikipedia