Winter Is Coming

Recently, Ren Zhengfei’s internal speech “The entire company’s operating policy must shift from pursuing scale to pursuing profit and cash flow” has gone viral. The main points are as follows:

1. The global economy will continue to decline in the next decade, and household consumption will drop significantly. Huawei must be prepared for winter. Ren Zhengfei warned Huawei people not to brag and tell stories anymore, but to talk about reality, based on actual business, and not just aim for scale, but pursue cash flow and real profits. If, as Mr. Ren said, the global economy declines in the next decade, the demand for non-essential daily necessities such as consumer electronics and luxury goods will drop significantly. People will care more about essential daily necessities such as food, clothing, and energy, and the prices of basic raw materials will continue to rise.
2. Make a little money wherever there is money: It is necessary to compress or transfer administrative personnel to front-line business personnel, and compress non-profitable businesses. Huawei’s business should focus on doing ICT infrastructure, being a base, and not doing a fake ecosystem. The core is still to practice internal skills well, lay a solid foundation, and make money if you can.
3. Business optimization, personnel optimization: Resolutely cut off non-profitable businesses. The surviving teams will get more if they work more, and get nothing if they don’t work. In the end, even if they starve to death, they will not be rescued.

This is not the first time Ren Zhengfei has warned Huawei to be aware of potential dangers and prepare for winter. In 2000, when the Internet bubble burst, Ren Zhengfei published “Huawei’s Winter”, which spread throughout the Internet circle. This time, facing a global economic recession, Ren Zhengfei once again threw out the cold winter theory, which is equally impressive.

Facing the recession, not only Huawei, but everyone must be prepared for winter.

1. Guard your wallet. When people generally lose their sources of income and worry about three meals a day, they will have crooked ideas, cheating and swindling, and debts not being repaid will appear frequently. Especially some scammers will take advantage of people’s eagerness to make money to design various scams in an attempt to get something for nothing. Facing high investment returns, remember one sentence: When you covet the scammer’s high returns, the scammer is thinking about your principal.
2. Do everything possible to make money. Prepare as much food as possible for the winter; no one can predict how long the recession will last. We must make every effort to stock up on food to survive the cold winter and wait for the return of spring.

In response to Mr. Ren’s winter theory, I decided to return to the zero-cost movie watching and reading method of my student days—only watching pirated movies and pirated books. The first pirated movie I watched recently was “Return to Dust”. The story of the movie is the same as “The Shape of Water”, also about two lonely hearts coming together. It’s just that “The Shape of Water” used a fairy tale to cover up the lonely soul, while “Return to Dust” used heavy reality to shatter the beauty of life. “Return to Dust” went from being ignored to rising box office, which also verified the point of view of the previous article. Chinese movies have fallen into a trough. We cannot blame the censorship mechanism. Filmmakers still have to reflect on whether their abilities are too poor to make good movies.

Published at: Sep 2, 2022 · Modified at: Dec 11, 2025