Huawei ranks #6 among world’s most innovative companies for 2020

Huawei has been ranked amongst the world's most innovative companies for 2020, placing 6th in a new report from Boston Consulting Group.

BCG's recently released list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2020 named Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and
Huawei occupy the top spots, followed by Alibaba, IBM, Sony and Facebook.

This is the highest ranking for the Huaweu, moving up 42 places since it first made the list in 2012.

The ranking is based on a survey of 2,500 global innovation executives and assesses companies' performance on four dimensions of Global "Mindshare", Industry Disruption, Industry Peer View and Value Creation.

This year, BCG also added a new scoring dimension that captures each company's variety and intensity of boundary breaking, by assessing its ability to breach established industry entry barriers and play in an array of markets outside its own.

"When we began the research for this 14th edition of BCG's Most Innovative Companies report, COVID-19 had not yet emerged," the BCG report says.

"As we explored the data and interacted with clients, however, it became clear that this year's core findings—about the advantages of scale and the imperative for serial innovation—may be even more relevant today as innovation leaders need to adapt to rapidly shifting patterns of supply, demand, consumer behaviour, and ways of doing business."

As the world's largest supplier of telecommunications equipment, Huawei has continuously invested over 10% of its annual revenue back into R-D. In 2019, the company's R-D expenditure totaled CNY131,659 million, accounting for 15.3% of its total revenue.

In terms of 5G, Huawei invested 4 billion USD in the past decade, which makes it the global leader in this next-generation technology.

To further commercial adoption and promote new innovation in 5G applications, the company has established 5G joint innovation centres together with carriers worldwide.

According to its annual report, the tech giant is shifting itself from an innovation 1.0 model to Innovation 2.0, which means breakthroughs in basic theory and developing new basic technologies, driven by shared vision for the future.

In the global fight against COVID-19, Huawei doubled down its innovation efforts and launched the Anti-COVID-19 Partner Program that focuses on AI, remote office, smart healthcare and online education, to support the fight against the pandemic. Its AI-assisted diagnosis, for example, could output CT quantification results in seconds and help frontline medical staff detect COVID-19 cases.