Common Catch-up strategies of Hikvision and Huawei R&D strategy

Common Catch-up strategies of Hikvision and Huawei

1. 
   R&D strategy
   

Huawei invested heavily in Research and Development. Averagely each year, at least 10 % of annual sales were put into R&D for developing absorptive capacity. Huawei so far has established 14 R&D centers around the world, being embedded in the collaboration with suppliers, customers, universities, and leading players. The same is true of Hikvision. Since its establishment, it has continuously strengthened its R & D investment and persisted in independent innovation. Investment to research and development has made Hikvision have strong sustainable research and development strength.

So far, Huawei has been building advanced research labs with more than 20 Chinese domestic research institutes and universities such as Beijing University (since Nov. 2005), Zhongshan University, China (since Dec. 2008), Zhejiang University, China (since March, 2008), Tsinghua University, China (since Jan. 2007), University of Science and Technology of China (since April, 2009), Xi Dian University, China (since Dec. 2007), Sanjiang Unversity, China (since Sept, 2007), Northwest Polytechnical University, China (since Oct. 2004) etc.

Moreover, more than 10 joint training programs with Chinese universities in different regions were founded, namely ‘Huawei High Level Talented-Person Cultivation Base’ (Huawei Rencai Pei Yang Ji Di). These joint programs are purposive to provide Chinese graduates with pre-career education. Huawei treated universities and institutes as its knowledge incubator because it has been proved to offer Huawei much more benefits than expected. Hikvision has also a postdoctoral research station unit, with five major research institutions in the world, including nine core technology and bigdata, cloud computing, cloud storage, binocular recognition of forward-looking technology along with strong talent training system.

2. 
   Realising customer power and market strategy
   

Both Hikvision and Huawei pays attention to market orientation, so they are always dedicated to providing high quality products and services for customers. Both companies believes that  the value opportunities bring is higher than their costs and develop long term strategies by seizing opportunities in the market. Their approach is to keep a reasonable profit margin, invest more in the future, and share more value with its customers, suppliers, and partners. In the globalized world where consumerism is its peak point, both companies taking advantage of a the growing demand of the variety of products and for example, in the face of this demand, Hikvision has tried to make itself a integrated supplier of video surveillance. With the fragmentation and industrialization of security industry, Hikvision is concerned about the development of segmentation market, and provides innovative customized services combined with different needs of customers.

To conclude, in order to overcoming the challenges of the latecomer disadvantage and leveraging global markets to build scale, both companies developing not only strong technological innovation capabilities but also complementary capabilities, such as marketing and professional management as a part of catching up strategy.