“Come work for Huawei and we’ll give an apartment!” New graduates have a terrible time finding housing, especially in Shanghai or Beijing. Ren has decided to compete for the best talent in the world. The apartments going up in the Shanghai Qingpu research park will lure some of the best to Huawei.
In China, the company is offering a handful of top PhDs as much as US$300,000. Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and the other Chinese giants are competing for graduates. It is hiring 15,000 this year.
Huawei has 15 large research centres around the world, backed by a huge R & D budget. It is the only company in communications that is investing heavily in basic science.
Why Shanghai when headquarters are in Shenzen? The company didn’t say, but I’d guess the nightlife is much livelier in Shanghai.
Google, Facebook, and others are expanding rapidly in New York and San Francisco, where young people want to live.
Shenzen is a less exciting all-business town.
Huawei is raising research spending in 2019 to over US$17 billion, up from $15B in 2018. That is more than the next five telecom companies combined and puts Huawei in the worldwide top five.