近日，美国《时代》杂志刊发华为轮值董事长徐直军的署名文章。文中，徐直军回顾了其自1993年入职华为以来三十余年的创新历程：从程控交换机起步，历经IPD变革、分布式基站与SingleRAN技术确立移动通信领先地位，再到依托2012实验室孵化5G、自动驾驶及昇腾芯片。文章深入剖析了华为如何通过重视人才与持续高额研发投入，实现从跟随到全球引领的跨越。
TIME
以下是原文（观察者网翻译，未经作者确认）：
初创期的 talent 战略与程控交换机突破
1993年5月，我在深圳求职期间，被《深圳特区报》上一则华为招聘硕士和博士的整版广告吸引。当时深圳以加工贸易为主，极少有企业如此重视高学历人才。出于好奇面试后，我顺利获得录用。相较于其他offer，华为HR每周致电的尊重态度、急切需求以及承诺给予我导师五倍的薪水，让我最终选择了华为。
入职后我发现，在600名员工中，研发工程师超过200人，同年入职博士达五位。考虑到当时全国博士年毕业生仅约2000人，华为在创业初期对人才的巨额投入，彰显了其对创新和未来的坚定承诺。
当时研发团队主攻数字程控交换机。面对中国电话供需失衡且西方设备昂贵（每线约3000元）、标准不一的局面，我们抓住机会，研发出通过光纤连接的远端交换模块。该方案用一套集中式系统即可覆盖全县网络，解决了偏远地区建站的成本与信号衰减问题。
凭借每线约1000元的低价和超20%的利润率，我们在与拥有合资背景的西方厂商竞争中迅速突围。1993年至2002年间，华为员工增至2.2万人（研发超1万人），营收逼近40亿美元，完成了原始积累。
引入IBM咨询，构建IPD管理体系
2002年，我负责推动“集成产品开发（IPD”变革；2005年任投资评审委员会（IRB）主任。这一变革源于创始人任正非1997年访美后的构想，华为聘请IBM进行指导，旨在重塑研发决策流程、组织架构及文化。
变革前，研发成功依赖个别天才，产品高质量具有偶然性。IPD体系建立后，我们实现了稳定交付满足客户需求的高质量产品。1999年至2006年，华为向IBM支付近6亿美元咨询费，这可能是中国历史上规模最大的单笔企业咨询项目。
经过十年建设，IPD管理体系不仅支撑了研发团队从1万人扩张至如今的11万人，更确保了创新产品的持续高效产出。即便在2011年出任轮值CEO后，我仍致力于推动IPD与时俱进，牵引业务发展。
技术创新：分布式基站与SingleRAN
2003年，我担任无线产品线总裁，使命是将华为从固定网络设备商转型为固移融合供应商。因国内3G牌照发放延迟，我们被迫出海。
当时，余承东在欧洲发现基站站点获取成本高且空间有限，提出将基站拆分为两部分：一部分上塔，另一部分做成小盒子放入现有机柜。这一“分布式基站”方案虽初遇阻力，但最终成为3G、4G、5G基站的标准形态。
此外，余承东还提出将2G与3G集成于同一基站。随后我们与沃达丰合作推出SingleRAN，物理上集成2G/3G/4G/5G，成为全球基站事实标准。这两项开创性方案确立了华为在移动通信领域的全球领先地位。
基础研究：2012实验室与未来布局
为应对数字信息洪流，华为于2011年成立“2012实验室”，整合研究团队，聚焦基础研究、核心技术与工程能力。该实验室资金由公司与各业务单元共同承担，旨在确保持续创新。自动驾驶、5G和昇腾芯片均在此孵化。
- 5G领域：早在2009年启动研究，现为5G标准主要贡献者及全球最大专利持有者之一。
- 智能汽车：2012年成立车联网实验室，奠定自动驾驶解决方案的领先基础。
- 人工智能：2016年启动AI研究，确保在未来竞争中占据有利位置。
得益于2012实验室在基础研究与技术成熟度上的深耕，华为得以持续推出超前于市场需求的创新产品。
结语：机制保障下的持续创新
我的职业生涯见证了华为研发团队的成长。这一切背后，是利益共享机制的支撑——几乎所有符合条件员工均持有公司股权。2007年至2025年，华为累计研发投入超2700亿美元（1.8万亿元人民币），占年收入10%以上。截至目前，华为获授权专利24.5万件。
尊重并保护知识产权，结合高效的研发投资管理体系，汇聚了大批杰出工程师。正是这些因素，让华为在激烈竞争中不断突破极限，实现持续增长。
副董事长、轮值董事长 徐直军
2026年9月29日
以下为英文原文：
Back in May 1993, as I was wrapping up my Ph.D., I took a trip to Shenzhen to look for work. While at a friend's house, I was flipping through theShenzhen Special Zone Dailyand was immediately drawn to a full-page recruitment ad from Huawei. It specifically highlighted that they were looking for people with a master's degree or doctorate. It was odd. As the frontier of China's reform and opening up, Shenzhen was a hub for processing and trade, and very few companies were hiring people with higher education. Out of curiosity, the next day I went for an interview and ended up getting offered a job.
As the day of my graduation neared, I had already received several offers but the one from Huawei stood out. Their HR manager would call me every week, saying everything was ready and they were expecting me. The respect they showed me, the urgency of their calls, and the promise of a salary five times more than that of my Ph.D. supervisor made the decision easy. I chose Huawei.
When I came onboard in August, I realized that, of the company's 600 employees, more than 200 were R&D engineers, as well as a ton of postgraduates. Five Ph.D.s joined that same year. It was unimaginable anywhere in China, especially in Shenzhen, because the entire country was producing only about 2,000 Ph.D. graduates a year. Huawei's huge bets on talent in its early years were a clear sign of its commitment to innovation and forward-looking investment.
Back then, the R&D team was working on digital stored program control switches. As China's economy soared, demand for household and office phones far outstripped supply. For years, getting a phone line installed was difficult and expensive. Switches from Western vendors were available in China, but they used a wide range of incompatible standards and went for about 3,000 Chinese yuan per line. That was a fortune at the time.
This presented an opportunity. Back then, major urban centers were surrounded by geographically dispersed townships and villages. Setting up a complete switch for each location didn't make economic sense, and connecting distant communities with copper was both expensive and prone to signal loss. So, we came up with a fiber-connected remote switching module, which allowed for a single centralized system to provide network coverage for an entire county.
Our customers liked it. And that's how we managed to rapidly grow our business in a head-to-head race with established Western vendors, all of whom had joint ventures with our customers. Our product was cheaper, around 1,000 yuan per line, with a profit margin higher than 20%. This helped sustain Huawei's rapid growth and gave us much-needed cash flow. In a short span of ten years (1993–2002), our headcount climbed to 22,000, including over 10,000 R&D engineers, and revenue was closing in on $4 billion.
Many leading U.S. companies started out small. They struck out on their own, probing forward one step at a time, selling products to make money, and investing it back into R&D. They epitomized the ethos of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." And the same can be said for Huawei.
In 2002, I was unexpectedly put in charge of a major transformation program called Integrated Product Development (IPD). Then in 2005, I was appointed the chair of the Investment Review Board (IRB), a role that oversees all of the company's product investments. When I became rotating CEO in 2011, I handed over the IPD-related responsibilities, but even now I still devote a lot of my time to keeping IPD up-to-date and driving Huawei's business development.
IPD was a game changer in how we developed products and made R&D investment decisions. It also completely reshaped our R&D structure. Prior to this transformation, our R&D successes were highly dependent on individual outperformers, and high-quality products were a matter of chance. The IPD transformation put systems in place for us to reliably deliver competitive, quality products that meet our customers' needs.
IPD was the brainchild of our founder Ren Zhengfei. In 1997, he visited several U.S. tech companies and was inspired by the way they developed their products. Following this visit, he brought on IBM as a consultant to help us design and execute a sweeping transformation across our R&D investment decision processes, organization, and culture.
The transformation kicked off in 1999. I was one of many participants in the program until 2002, when I was given the reins to work alongside IBM consultants and drive the transformation forward, rolling out the IPD process across all of R&D.
Over the course of a decade, we developed a more efficient decision-making process for R&D investment, a process for integrated product development, and the corresponding organizational structures, capabilities, and IT systems – collectively called the IPD Management System. It's this system that has enabled us to not only manage an ever-expanding R&D team (from 10,000 members then to 110,000 today) but keep delivering innovative products that meet our customers' evolving needs.
From 1997 to 2006, Huawei paid IBM nearly $600 million in consulting fees. This may very well be the largest single corporate consulting engagement in China's history.
In 2003, I was appointed president of the Wireless Product Line. At the time, the division had just over 2,000 people, and was working on 3G products. My mission was to transform Huawei from a fixed-network equipment supplier to a provider of both fixed and mobile network equipment. As China kept delaying the issuance of 3G licenses, we were forced to pursue market expansion overseas.
Back then, Richard Yu was responsible for WCDMA products, one of the main technologies that powers 3G networks. While visiting a base station equipment room with the Dutch carrier Telfort, he discovered that site acquisition costs in Europe were exceptionally high, and there wasn't really any room for new base stations anyway. He called me from Europe to discuss whether we could split a base station into two parts—one part placed on the cell tower, and the other into a small box that could be installed inside the existing base station's cabinet. We both thought it was a plausible solution, so we decided to create a distributed base station.
The solution was met with resistance from many carriers and equipment vendors, but it eventually became standard for the 3G, 4G, and 5G base stations we see today. Richard also proposed integrating 2G and 3G into a single base station during a discussion with Telefónica Germany. Later, in collaboration with Vodafone, we launched SingleRAN, a solution that physically integrates 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G into a single base station. This, too, became the de facto standard for base stations around the world. These two groundbreaking solutions—the distributed base station and SingleRAN—established Huawei's global leadership in mobile communications.
To find our Noah's Ark amid the coming flood of digital information, we strengthened our basic research efforts. In 2011, we consolidated the company's research teams into a new organization—2012 Labs, named after the film2012: Doomsday. It would serve as a platform for investment in sustained innovation, including basic research, core technologies, and engineering capabilities. At the same time, we changed our R&D investment model: Part of 2012 Labs' funding would come from the company, and the rest from its business units. From day one, I have been shaping the Labs' organization, team, capabilities, and future-oriented research projects. Autonomous driving, 5G, and Ascend were all incubated there.
We began researching 5G as early as 2009, ultimately becoming a major contributor to 5G standards and one of the world's largest holders of 5G patents, cementing Huawei's global leadership in the field. In 2012, I led the establishment of the Internet of Vehicles Lab under 2012 Labs to conduct research on future automotive technologies, a move that led to our autonomous driving solutions, and laid the foundation for our leadership in that domain. In 2016, the Labs began researching AI, securing us a place in the race to come.
Thanks to the Labs' pioneering basic research, technology readiness, and engineering capabilities, Huawei has been able to continuously launch innovative products and solutions that keep ahead of market demand.
I joined Huawei in 1993 to work in R&D, and have spent the vast majority of my career witnessing, taking part in, and leading Huawei's innovation journey—one shared by hundreds of thousands of people in our R&D team.
Our commitment to talent is backed by a benefit-sharing mechanism that gives virtually every qualified employee an equity stake. We invest more than 10% of our annual revenue back into R&D, with a total R&D spend of more than $270 billion (1.8 trillion yuan) from 2007 to 2025. We have the utmost respect for others' intellectual property while protecting our own, with 245,000 patents granted to Huawei to date. Our system for effectively managing R&D investments has helped us bring together a large swathe of incredible engineers, laying a solid foundation for sustained innovation.
All of these factors have enabled Huawei to keep pushing the limits of our products, launching one competitive offering after another to grow and thrive in highly competitive markets.
Eric Xu
Deputy Chairman, Rotating Chairman
September 29, 2026