Recruiting in China

Chinese tech company Huawei announced Tuesday its smartphone shipments have topped 100 million this year, breaking the record among domestic players and making it the world's third biggest mobile brand following Samsung and Apple.

The market share of Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies Company has risen to 9 percent globally and surpassed 15 percent in China, leading for six consecutive months, data from a third-party market consulting agency showed.

"It's a stunning increase," said He Gang, president of Huawei's mobile phone line. "Beginning in 2010 with a sales figure of no more than 3 million, Huawei took five years to reach 75 million and another year to achieve 100 million."

He said Huawei has gained a firm foothold in the middle and high-end market over the past year, thanks to innovation and marketing. Middle and high-end smartphones costing more than 2,000 yuan (308 U.S. dollars) jumped to 33 percent of Huawei's total shipments in the third quarter in China.

Huawei's Mate 7 alone has sold 7 million sets so far, making it one of the most popular smartphone models in China. Sales of the new Mate 8 in the first two weeks were ten times that of Mate 7.

Mate 8 falls in the same price category as the Samsung Galaxy series and Apple's iPhone models.

"It's just a matter of time before we introduce high-end smartphones at a price above 5,000 yuan," He said.

Huawei has also been nurturing its overseas terminal market. The company's mobile phones are sold in more than 170 countries and regions.

Smartphones sold for between 400 and 500 euros claimed a market share of more than 60 percent in some Western European countries. Huawei also saw a good year in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, where the number of smartphones it sold reached more than 3.46 million and increased 114 percent compared with the same period last year.

Huawei has already overtaken Samsung and Apple in some developed countries, including Spain and Portugal. International sales are expected to account for 40 percent of the company's revenue by 2016.

According to a company report released on Tuesday, Huawei invested 40.8 billion yuan in research and development in 2014, or 14.2 percent of annual revenue.

Huawei has set up 16 overseas R&D institutions, according to CEO Ren Zhengfei, adding his company has invested more than 190 billion yuan in technological innovation and holds a total of 76,687 patents. More than 18,000 patents are related to terminals, which has laid a foundation for expanding its smartphone offerings.

"We are putting money in all the cutting-edge technology in the communications industry. Huawei is not second to global brands such as Ericsson and Nokia in technology," He said.

"Believe it or not, our goal is to overtake Apple in the near future," He said.

The added value of China's electronics and IT manufacturing industry rose by 10.8 percent year on year from January to November in 2015, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The statistics only covered the enterprises whose annual business revenue each exceeds 20 million yuan (3.09 million U.S. dollars).

The growth rate was 4.7 percentage points higher than the average level of the country's entire industrial sector in the period.

According to the ministry, the electronics and IT manufacturing industry reported 8.89 trillion yuan in bulk business revenue in the first ten months of the year, up 8 percent from a year ago, with its net profits surging 14.4 percent to 403.7 billion yuan.

Lin Nianxiu, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, at a sub-forum of the ongoing World Internet Conference that runs through Friday.

China welcomes foreign companies to join the tide of the country's Internet development to achieve win-win outcomes, as the sector is now in full swing under the Internet Plus strategy, said a senior official from the country's top economic planner on Thursday. [Special coverage]

"The Internet Plus model is able to effectively bridge demand and supply, generating a market of trillions of yuan," said Lin Nianxiu, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, at a sub-forum of the ongoing World Internet Conference that runs through Friday.

Foreign investments are more than welcome in China to help boost the Internet Plus strategy with their complementary advantages, he added.

"Cooperation from home and abroad will generate win-win results", as the country is seeking to streamline the new business format with improved regulations and mechanism, said Lin.

Earlier this year, the country put forward the Internet Plus strategy in a bid to connect isolated industries and upgrade traditional industries amid nationwide reconstructing and transformation.

China has witnessed a rapid development of its Internet industry over the past two decades. The Internet has profoundly affected almost every facet of Chinese people's lives including communication, transportation, and entertainment.

As of July 2015, the number of Internet users had reached 668 million, the most in the world, according to official figures. All cities and towns, and 93.5 percent of administrative villages in China now have access to the Internet.

The thriving Internet industry and the gigantic market potential have also bred countless Internet companies, and some of them, such as Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, have become international goliaths.

Chinese authorities have attached more importance to the Internet, pledging to transform China from a big Internet nation to a great one. The Internet, with better management, will be more open to the world.

British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca plans to invest more than $800 million in China in the next 10 years and strengthen cooperation with local partners, especially in the biologics sector.

AstraZeneca strengthened collaboration between its biologics unit MedImmune and local research organization Wuxi AppTec.

The UK company has an option to acquire WuXi AppTec's biologics manufacturing capacity in Wuxi with an overall investment valued around $100 million.

"These initiatives will allow us to connect local untapped pharmaceutical needs with our global portfolio," said Mark Mallon, executive vice president of International businesses at AstraZeneca.

The drugmaker will also invest $50 million to expand its development and launch facility on top of its existing manufacturing site in Wuxi to support both local and overseas markets.

Wuhan Iron & Steel Co (Wugang) will lay off 6,196 people by the end of February 2016, news portal jiemian.com reported on Monday.

The workforce stood at 27,760 people based on the company's 2014 financial report, so the job cut will cover more than 20 percent of its staff.

Wugang's parent company, Wuhan Iron and Steel (Group) Corp (WISCO), will likely eliminate roughly 11,000 jobs, with a 20 percent pay cut to be imposed on all employees in 2016, the same report said, citing several anonymous sources at WISCO.

But Sun Jing, director of WISCO's communication department, was quoted as saying in the report that there have been no layoffs or pay cuts. He also explained that according to company policy, an employee may face a pay cut of up to 20 percent only when he or she fails to complete the workload.

While the year 2015 has witnessed fingerprint recognition scanner becoming a must-have feature in top of the line handsets, iris scanning technology is expected to be the center of attraction in high-end smartphones in the next few years.

Iris recognition, an automated method of biometric identification, enables you to unlock the phone as well as secure mobile payment by scanning your eyes instead of the tip of your fingers.

The new recognition method, which analysts said is widely regarded as becoming the next security standard, has found its way to mobile devices.

South Korean tech giant Samsung is rumored to be working on its next generation of Galaxy S7 smartphones, which will come with the iris scanning technology in 2016.

Another South Korean smartphone manufacturer, LG, which hadn't originally even intended to integrate fingerprint scanner on its LG G4, is reportedly very likely to become a front-runner in smartphone technological breakthroughs. According to tech news portal techradar.com's report in November, LG's next generation LG G5, which is expected to be released early 2016, could sport an iris scanner.

Smaller smartphone makers, Guangdong-based Vivo and Japan's Fujitsu, have already tried out this technology on their flagship smartphones, Vivo X5 Pro and Fujitsu ARROWS NX F-04G, respectively.

Fujitsu promoted its gizmo that can unlock a screen with a 0.6-second glance, and Vivo X5 Pro claimed it can secure almost all mobile applications. The two devices created quite a sensation among tech enthusiasts when they were launched in May, but their sales were reportedly not particularly high, as iris recognition doesn't seem to be a feature ordinary consumers are looking for in the next generation of smartphones.

"I will not change or buy a smartphone only for the sake of enjoying the new technology, which is like a supplementary feature for passwords, not a necessary one," Shang Xin, a 31-year-old Beijing resident, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

He added that it is slightly inconvenient to constantly have to lift the phone to your eyes, and the infrared light will also make the technology annoying and invasive if done regularly.

"I think fingerprint scanning technology is enough for my daily use with respect to security and speed," he said.

Fingerprint recognition, another biometric identification method, was widely integrated into high-end smartphones this year.

"Technologically speaking, iris scanning will be more secure than other identification methods," Zhu Dalin, an industry analyst with Beijing-based market consultancy Analysys International, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"But this does not mean that fingerprint scanning technology will head out of the door in favor of iris scanning, especially when current iris scanning technology is not significantly faster," said Zhu. "One of the reasons why fingerprint scanning caught on was thanks to Apple's solution - Touch ID - which slightly edged out typing in passwords in terms of speed."

Experts are concerned that the new technology may still carry some disadvantages for users who have eye-related disorders as well as those who are trying to unlock their phones without enough light present.

But consumers are likely to see the adoption of iris scanning technology in next year's smart devices as a strong selling point as the global smartphone market continues to mature.

U.S. market consultancy International Data Corp (IDC) forecast on December 3 that 2015 will be the first full year of single-digit growth of 9.8 percent year-on-year in worldwide smartphone shipments, settling at a total of 1.43 billion units. IDC also predicted that the once red-hot smartphone market in China would grow by only 1.2 percent this year, down from 19.7 percent in 2014.