We spoke with Jeremy Thompson, who is Executive Vice President of Huawei UK, and oversees the development of Huawei’s UK businesses.
Jeremy joined Huawei UK in 2012 as deputy managing director with specific responsibility for carrier strategy, business change, and key customers. Prior to Huawei, Jeremy worked for 20 years in senior management roles, including product leadership and telecoms joint venture development for BT group in the UK and other parts of Europe, including Spain and the Nordics.
Jeremy’s also previously worked in the USA and the UK for an IBM software company and consulting businesses.
We spoke at length about Huawei’s reaction to the recent UK Government decision to force UK mobile operators to remove all Huawei 5G equipment by 2027.
We also addressed a number of other issues:
- How early generations (1G, 2G, 3G etc) helped form the current 5G standards
- The inherent benefits of 5G for the UK and beyond
- How Jeremy has been leading Huawei through the current crisis
- How Huawei has embraced the Covid-19 lockdown
- What is next for Huawei in the UK
- How the telecoms industry will evolve towards 6G
- How standards are important to drive innovation
- How the current US-China trade war is bad for innovation
Episode Transcript
Andrew Grill: Welcome to season two, episode nine of the Actionable Futurist® Podcast.
Today’s guest is Jeremy Thompson, who is Executive Vice President of Huawei UK, and oversees the development of Huawei’s UK businesses. Jeremy joined Huawei UK in 2012 as deputy managing director with specific responsibility for carrier strategy, business change, and key customers. Prior to Huawei, Jeremy worked for 20 years in senior management roles, including product leadership and telecoms joint venture development for BT group in the UK and other parts of Europe, including Spain and the Nordics.
Jeremy’s also previously worked in the USA and the UK for an IBM software company and consulting businesses. Welcome Jeremy.
Jeremy Thompson: Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. Good to talk to you.
Andrew Grill: We have a lot in common. We’ve both got a career in telco. We’ve both worked with IBM. So what’s been your journey to Huawei UK.
Jeremy Thompson: Well as you mentioned.
I did , in the earlier part of my career work in professional services with IBM, , in the US and, then in the mid nineties, early nineties, I came back to the UK and I joined a British telecom BT, and, , worked for 20 years for BT. , so I’ve been really in the, , telecom space now for a two or three decades and seeing the development from, analog through first-generation now and into a fifth generation.
And my background is in product and product management and joint ventures, , which BT had a number across Europe.
Andrew Grill: We have very similar career direct trajectories. We’ll explore that in a minute, but it’s great to talk to another telco friendly person. So back on season two, episode four, we spoke with your colleague Paul Scanlon about the future of 5G and we had a really interesting discussion about Huawei’s approach to 5G from a technology point of view. I won’t ask you a bunch of technology questions today, but what does 5G mean to you?
Jeremy Thompson: 5G as it implies is the next generation. , and every generation brings new opportunities, , in the wireless space.
But, , potentially I think the second generation was significant. The fourth generation was significant and the fifth generation is probably very significant. , We, as an industry can be criticised a little bit of over promising to quote, Bill Gates, we overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term and, , 5G is going to deliver on a number of promises that perhaps have been made over the last few years.
But if 4G was about, , apps and consumers and smartphones, 5G is about connected devices, and B2B and health and agriculture and verticals. , so we think we’re on the cusp of a major change in the telecommunications industry and the ecosystem around it. , I’m sure we’re going to talk about that, but it may take another two or three years before the networks are rolled out and the applications are developed and, , someone has the aha iPhone moment, , in 5G.
Andrew Grill: What’s funny you, miss 3G as that inflection point. I remember when 3G came out and I won’t name the carrier, but, , everyone was promising video calling. I think I’ve made two video calls in my entire life. It was really about faster internet, although when my phone goes back to 3G or heaven forbid E for Edge, I just have to cringe. I think edge should be illegal in any country.
Jeremy Thompson: There’s enough legislation being talked about in our industry right now, I would suggest tha the superior technology of 4G is going to replace 3G, and you going to see 3G retired probably before 2G, , that there are some applications on 2G which worked well, 3G , that spectrum probably will be refarmed and used in 5G.
Andrew Grill: Even my old employer Telstra I think has turned off their entire 2G network and the spectrum is being re-farmed, so there are some countries where you can’t actually get a 2G signal. You’ve been at Huawei for eight or so years. Tell me about your heritage of research and innovation here in the UK.
Jeremy Thompson: Huawei, is one the top investors in R& D in any industry, I think we’re in the top five or six. In the telco sector where we’re number one and number one by quite a long way. This year, we’re going to invest 20 billion globally in R&D and , that’s delivered considerable competitive advantage.
and given us the jump on the 5G space. Here in the UK. , we have a number of centers of excellence for research and development not the least of which is the optical, , research and development and chip design that we recently announced a billion pound investment in, , developing that further and, , a.
Fabrication unit as well, , R&D , is a team sport, and in order for us to really maximise the benefits, you’ve got to have an ecosystem around, and so we chose Cambridge to make that major investment, where there is already quite a good and developed ecosystem in chip design, chip development.
Andrew Grill: Now let’s address the elephant in the room. Recently, the UK Government ruled that your 5G kit must be removed from UK operator networks by 2027. That’s a pretty big deal , so if your kit must be removed, what does that entail, what might it cost operators and why will it take so long to complete?
Jeremy Thompson: First of all, we’re very disappointed at that decision, which reverses the decision made in January of this year, and it essentially takes time because if you imagine the infrastructure that is necessary to create a wireless network, it’s physical antenna, which often sit on top of buildings.
Getting access to those buildings, getting cranes, moving that equipment is not a trivial task, , because many of them are in city centers. , and even if you can get access to the building, you need to get permission from the local authorities. , plus there is a very key economic reason why it can’t happen immediately.
and that is, huge investment has got into implementing the 4G, 5G networks , and , there has to be a return on investment. , The carriers, BT and Vodafone have been very clear to the UK Government, if they seek to accelerate any faster than 2027 the cost will go into the billions and for them, there’ll be blackouts because the very nature of wireless design is you can’t just take down one cell and expect all the other cells to compensate. , , if you’re doing a swap, you need to plan it, you need to get the permissions, you need to get the cranes, do the physicals, it’s quite a protracted exercise, and then if you have to do it in a hurry, It’s very expensive, , and risks blackouts, and I don’t think anyone wants those.
Andrew Grill: From a technologist’s view, this is unheard of that the Government mandates to remove equipment that’s been bought and paid for and installed.
And as you say, it’s not trivial to take antennas off roofs. Is this the first time this has happened?
Jeremy Thompson: Yes, I think it is the first time. I can’t think of another example. And that’s probably why they’ve chosen the date for 2027 because. , we’re talking about 5G today, but 6G, , , is the end of this decade.
There is a natural churn, , that if you build it within the natural churn and build your plans within the natural churn, , the costs can be managed, and the engineering functions can be organized, , but actually, , the true cost to this. , decision is, , the real significant cost is actually to the UK consumers because, , whilst BT have said, it’s going to cost them half a billion, , in direct costs, The UK was the second country in Europe, , to launch 5G and was well-placed with a number of government initiatives to, , experiment early on with 5G, , with the, , DCMS test beds. So government sponsored test beds, , in manufacturing, which Huawei was involved , in tourism, in many other verticals. So the UK was poised to make significant inroads and benefits from
5G that it could use to improve the productivity in the UK, and then export to other countries who were then developing the 5G. Assembly Research, , did some research before the announcement and they said a two year delay to, , the UK would cost somewhere in the region I believe it was something like 30 billion in GDP loss and we’ve given that away and, , we’re disappointed, , the carriers, , are going to manage the transition, but actually UK consumers, if they follow the American model, will be paying 30%. , and we’ve lost the competitive advantage of being the first mover in 5G, where we learn early, we, , develop the skills we use it for improved productivity, and then we can export that to other markets. All of that , has been lost by this decision.
Andrew Grill: Just some reflections on that, so you’re right, hat the consumers are going to lose out because if you’re replacing a cell site and it’s a shared cell site, it might mean the Vodafone and O2 to have to go off the air and all the networks go off because removing antennas, it’s a safety issue and you can’t have, , active antennas there as well.
I’m a Futurist so I bought a 5G SIM, I’ve actually got a Huawei 5G MiFi. Here in South Kensington. I have full strength, 5G. I move a kilometre up the road into North Kensington, , and there’s no 5G coverage. So we haven’t even rolled out even in central London, 5G and already it’s being ripped out.
. You and I have been in the telco industry for a while. We know that the mobile space is very collegiate, whether it be between operators, even between vendors. What do you think your competitors in the UK think of this decision?
Jeremy Thompson: Andrew, I guess you probably want to ask the competitors, but, , that’d be rubbing their hands. , we are the market leader. , we are, , , the first to market with 5G. Ericsson has a great product also, Nokia a little bit further behind, , they’ll be given the resources, , to, , have a decent product as well, and then there are a number of, , , other players, but, , our position will be filled by those two in the short term.
And then in the longer term, there may be greater diversity. In the market, but , this is a, , a big R&D play in order to play in any of these generations, the latter generations, you need to spend a lot in research and development. And, , I was reflecting with one of my colleagues the other day.
We used to have three, , UK based telecommunications suppliers, , to choose from plus all the international ones. And now we just have three global players. , so whoever comes into the market needs to, , invest heavily in R&D, and as far as 5G is concerned, Huawei owns 20% of the patents, which are in the product anyway.
So whoever’s using it will have 20% of all these patents and intellectual property in there.
Andrew Grill: So I’m hearing the operators are actually happy to keep your kit, , if they were able to, what does the decision mean though for the existing 4G networks where I’m sure you have a big footprint as well?
Jeremy Thompson: of the things that I find reassuring in my job is the support we get from our customers who know us really well, , and have invested heavily in telecommunications infrastructure and can compare Huawei with other suppliers and , , , , you might expect me to say this, but it happens on a daily basis.
They love our kit. It’s reliable, it’s cutting edge. They like this service that we give so they’re really disappointd that were being pulled out of the market. , , , they’re going to have to manage without it.
The 4G networks can stay, , this ruling is about 5G, , and, , 5G is written on, built on 4G, so there’ll have to be some reengineering and some 4G will have to be taken out in order to make space for 5G. We were talking earlier on and, , we have 2G in some networks and 3G and in many networks, , 4G will be around for a number of years, and my expectation is that we will continue to support, , our customers in their existing networks for as long as they want us to, but this ruling is about 5G not 4G.
Andrew Grill: So what’s the feeling like within Huawei UK right now? How are the employees feeling? It’s probably a fairly confusing time.
Jeremy Thompson: Disappointed I think We were really excited and we tooled up to launch 5G. We launched in a big way with three of the four carriers here in the UK. , We supported the early launch, we supported the Government in their, , test beds and we were really geared up for, , implementing the decision made in January.
So the decision that was made in, , July is hugely disappointing to our business. , and, , it just means that we need to adjust our expectations of what we will do here in the UK.
Andrew Grill: So final question before we move on to more interesting topics. You personally, you now lead Huawei here in the UK.
How do you lead personally at a time like this? What are the traits that you have to pull out of the hat to lead and motivate your team?
Jeremy Thompson: I think it’s like any other leadership situation. A lot of it comes down to communication and getting the tone right. it’s not great for our employees to open up the newspaper on a daily basis and see Huawei in the paper for the wrong reasons, especially when, , , we’re being accused of things that they know are not true, and we are in the middle of a trade war between the US and China, between a tech war between the US and China, the Americans are protecting their tech industry and, at the moment they’re attacking Huawei, and China, but I have to say it, I don’t think it’ll be long before there’ll be attacking other technologies and, other countries, to protect their own.
but at the moment it feels a little bit uncomfortable, so we have to reassure our teams they’re doing the right things. We have to lead them with the clarity of our purpose and our purpose has changed. So we have to change our organisation, change the goals for the people inside our business and keep open communication.
it’s, this time of, national crisis because of the health, in a way because we know where everyone is – they’re at home. we can communicate within minutes, as opposed to try and bring everyone into the office, and set up. we do regular Zoom meetings, to brief our staff, and to explain what’s happening and how we see it.
leadership at every level is key and communications, and having a clear sense of purpose is very key as well.
Andrew Grill: You make an interesting point about your sense that Huawei is being attacked. At time of recording last night in the US we saw Amazon Apple, Facebook, and Google under the spotlight from the senators.
And they were asking some very smart, pointed questions and other, quite grand sounding questions, but it seems now that if you get too big and too popular, even in the country of your origin, you’re fair game. So it’s interesting now that tech is so powerful that Governments see the need to control things.
Jeremy Thompson: We don’t underestimate the importance of the technology that we provide part of a wider ecosystem. we provide the equipment., it’s the carriers who run the networks, and then it’s the companies that you were talking about and others who provide the applications that sit on top of the carrier’s network that uses our equipment., so we’re a small part of that digital ecosystem that we can talk about all day and I would love to, because that is really what’s driving the economies now and driving the growth in the economies and enabling us to do what we’re doing now in the current health crisis.
We hardly missed a heartbeat in terms of our business, we were able to equip our engineering staff who are supporting installations and we moved from office to home, without really losing any efficiency in our business, and in some cases, gaining efficiency, that’s on a digital platform.
that’s the future, and this seems to be, quite an effective way of working to be honest.
Andrew Grill: While I’ve got you, because I’ve been asked a lot as a Futurist about what’s the future of work and we’ve compressed it now. So you’re a business leader you mentioned that you saw some productivity gains, where have you gained by having people distributed, but working digitally?
Jeremy Thompson: To get people together, even if you were all physically in the same building the meeting rooms and I’ve yet to work in a company or visit a company that doesn’t have constraint on the meeting rooms, even for the bosses, you might have your own space, but actually, we say we would like to get together, we’d like to get together right now, and actually sometimes it can take half a day to get a space big enough for the meeting. We do that in minutes now. using the tools, if someone’s available, then we can have a very effective meeting, over the technology, and the technology is 99% reliable, even for people working at home, thanks to the investment that had been made in the digital infrastructure, and what we’re talking about today is just improving that and I think the availability of getting together, the exchanging of information, whether you’re in the office handing a piece of paper over a desk or sending an email or sharing documents, in a screen. We haven’t missed a heartbeat, I don’t think in terms of, our business , we missed each other – missed the physical, it’s the softer side that I think we’re going to miss, and particularly for, the graduates and the younger people in the business, who feed off the interactions with the wider communities at every level. I mentor a number of graduates, like two, three, four years into their career. They’re the ones I feel most for because, they’re missing that face time and that interaction and somehow this doesn’t work quite as effectively, I would say, as the cup of coffee and a chat in the canteen.
Andrew Grill: You make a really interesting point. The Financial Times, were talking about how dead the city of London is at the moment, and they said the same thing, that the ones that miss out are the early, young leaders, the graduate side is being mentored.
Ironically, they live and breathe on their digital platform, but they need to be able to see you face to face, and so I think we’re going to see a hybrid where maybe we allow people … Let me ask you, so I talk about the third place. So at the moment before COVID we all worked in an office, now we’re working at home.
Is there a third place somewhere in between that isn’t the kitchen table, isn’t the Huawei headquarters or one of your satellite offices, a serviced office somewhere, a converted library, even Westfield, out at Shepherd’s Bush is going to re-ngineer some of the old department stores. Would you be happy for some of your employees to work in a third place so they didn’t have to busy up the kitchen table?
Jeremy Thompson: I think we’re going to see that. I think we’ve already seen the growth of, companies like Regus and others who provide, if you like airport style, touchdown places for as little as �25 a month, and when we didn’t have an office in a certain city, I would use that facility , very freely, very openly.
And they were always active and busy. So I think this might accelerate that trend. As you say that third space there’ll be less nine to five, five days a week in the office, and more, we go to the office for a purpose.
and I think we haven’t quite got to the point yet of what is the purpose of going to the office? and we’re experimenting a little bit with that now, but one of the first things we’ve identified is supporting our development of our growing executives, younger executives.
Andrew Grill: You must be listening to my podcast because I talk about the future of work, being the three-P’s People, Place and Purpose. People – obviously the skills that you need, the place we’re talking about is it the third place or wherever, but the purpose is why do we go to work? Why don’t we go into that work as well? I’m wondering as an executive, are you now more sympathic to people that are saying , I want to work from home, multiple days a week or maybe in Twitter’s case they’ve said permanently, but have you seen your approach chang because you yourself have had to work from home and see the challenges that brings up?
Jeremy Thompson: So throughout my career, I gone from, a hundred percent of the office to, an organization. So BT has encouraged teleworking over a number of years, and then Huawei doesn’t recognize prior to March this year, if someone was at home, we assumed that they were taking the day off. we just did not recognise homeworking as an organization.
We have, I think 14 offices here in the UK. we will put an office, and we expect people to go to the office. I think we have been very pleasantly surprised at how productive homeworking can be, but I don’t want to get overly excited by it because I’ve seen unproductive homeworking. If someone is permanently five days a week working from home, over a period of a year, two years, three years, the productivity I think is lost. I think in certain circumstances that can work, and certain roles that can work in certain personalities that can work.
But if, as a business, every person is encouraged to work from home it’s not an ideal business model. As a leader. I don’t particularly like that, and what I think we’re exploring, and Andrew, I know you are exploring is where is that middle ground between, 100% percent in the office and 100% percent at home.
And what works for the people, our staff, and what works for the company and what works for a long period of time because what might work for you for a year, two years might be different to what works better a few years later. So I think we now much more open in Huawei to having people work from home.
But I think our DNA is in the office.
Andrew Grill: I find that really fascinating in the fact that you are one side, not the other. I think if I can just imagine that probably someone in your organization was looking at a work from home strategy, it probably was over multiple months with trials and pilots and all of a sudden COVID-19 happens and we have this global work from home experiment.
So I’m seeing a lot of people saying, we actually did that pilot, it took five months and now we know what it’s like, and I think the learnings that you’ve got, you would never have got a multiple period of time, and I think what you’re doing is right there is a balance, I like being around people.
I’m an extrovert. sometimes I go a bit, stir-crazy working here on my own in my little studio apartment. I like being around people, but most of my friends that are in finance in the city, they don’t want to go back because they’re more productive, but we could talk about that forever. You talked before about the ecosystem of the telco industry, and that’s a nice segue , I started my career at Optus in Australia, then moved to Telstra, you’ve been in BT so we’ve seen a lot in the mobile space. What do you think is the most exciting thing about the telecoms industry at the moment?
Jeremy Thompson: At the moment, I’d have to say 5G because, we’re the beginning of a new age and it’s very difficult, it’s your job Andrew as a Futurologist to say, what’s going to happen and explain to people what’s going to happen.
I was commuting into London in, the early two thousands, people were on their Nokia phones, sending texts to each other within years, they’re on their smartphones using apps and it’s not 4G that created that it’s the ecosystem largely developed by Apple in the first instance they created a device which in itself wasn’t particularly special, but the apps and the app store that they got heavily criticised very recently in Congress for, it has.
Millions and millions of apps that have changed our lives. So if you take that as an experience and those of us in the industry at that time, knew apps were important, knew the device was important, but it took Apple to put the device and the apps together in a usable way that transformed an industry that Google then copied, and others have
aspired to and, and join the ecosystem. looking at 5G we’re going to have billions of devices. The technology allows you not just to connect a few hundred devices or a few thousand devices, billions of devices to a wireless network. People talk about driverless cars, that is one very visible potential application, but I think things like monitoring health, agriculture, which has largely sidestepped the digital revolution, knowing what the temperature of your soil is, knowing how much rain your grass has had, because there is a device which is cheap enough, and robust enough and has a longevity to be able to send data back to a central database.
I believe it’s those industries, which have not really been digitalised that are going to see the biggest impact. and in the same way that we were speculating, the apps and devices are gonna be important in 4G. We can see the sort of moving parts of IOT, the internet of things, and little devices and battery power.
and the connectivity of information, the storage of that information, the manipulation and understanding of that data using artificial intelligence, all the building blocks are in place. They haven’t quite been assembled in a way, which is digestible and there’s no sort of aha Apple iPhone moment.
but I think we’re on the cusp of that. and people are going to say, ah, we knew this was coming. We just didn’t know where it was going to come from. We didn’t think it was going to come from a computer manufacturer that is essentially failing at the time with the exception of the iPod.
We thought it was going to come from like a Microsoft or, in the telco world and you and I were in the telco world at that time, we were convinced it was going to come from the telcos, but it came from a computer manufacturer that bet the farm on a music device that then evolved into a smartphone that then redefined the industry.
My expectation is that someone from leftfield is going to come and redefine our industry for us.
Andrew Grill: You’re so right. I was a Nokia user for years. I lived in breathed, Nokia S60 just loved the device. If we look back at the iPhone 1, it was running on Edge and didn’t even have GPS so it was quite a dumb device, but you’re right, the app store was what made that. And now, most people have a smartphone of some sort. from 1G to 5G what do you think have been the highlights along the way? If we ignore 5G, becasue we talked about that a lot, where have you seen the accelerations and what has been the sort of inflection point for each of those G’s along the way that you’ve seen?
Jeremy Thompson: So I think we spoken about 4G and, the iPhone, which is you say in it’s first-generation was pretty basic, but the way it was launched, I thought it was quite smart. He explained everything that it did. and he said, Oh, and if you want to make a phone call, it does that as well.
Because our whole world was based on voice telephony, but the futurologist who ran Apple thought differently, he said it’s all about data, and so I think that was a major inflection point where the device in your pocket is not about the voice anymore, it’s about the data they’re designed for data, and if you wanted to use voice, we can make voice into data as well, and so I think that was significant. Moving from analog to the first GSM, was significant in that the Europeans were able to define a standard, which then became a global standard, ultimately in 4G and 4G was the first time that the whole globe was using the same standard, which means that the devices, the equipment, the engineering was, far more efficient in the way it was being created and built, which then reduces the price, which enables greater usage, and, we have the mobile industry that we enjoy today.
What I see and fear is that goodness, which came from the second generation the 2G GSM, is going to be lost in future generations because of this tech trade war, where, the Americans are seeking to split the internet between a China based technology and our American essentially based technology.
And then we’re going to see significant increase in costs and slower development cycles and less innovation. I think we owe it to ourselves to preserve the spirit of the second generation 2G, into the sixth generation and make sure we do not lose that sort of global set of standards that has served our industry so well, over the success of generation. Short answer to your question. I think the 4G and the move to data was a major development, and I think GSM less about the technology, but more about the fact that we had our first generation of global standards.
Andrew Grill: The standards are so important. Now, before we started recording, we reminisced about being at Mobile World Congress with a hundred thousand of our closest friends many times. If I look back to 2009, I was there with a Russian mobile advertising company, we’re on the main strip and I was on the screen every 15 minutes, it seemed like.
I remember that one quite well, but back then in 2009, it was about LTE versus WiMAX and probably everyone’s forgotten about WiMAX. So that was 11 years ago. Where will we be in 11 years time? If we’re at Mobile World Congress in 2031?
Jeremy Thompson: Great question. My hope is that we’ll have a global standard still that the Ericsson’s and the Huawei’s, and the new entrants contribute their intellectual property, cross license and we have a global standard that can be built to by anyone, and that we get the benefits of that standard. So from a telco point of view, and from an equipment manufacturer point of view, the underlying principle of standards and global standards and contribution of IPR to that development is still in place.
So that’s my hope, at the moment, I think it’s looking a bit fragile. and if that is the case, then the economies on which the applications sit are substantially reduced in terms of costs, and the development cycle are increased because of the global usage, and the return on investment means you get more dollar for your R&D.
and I think that we will be just ourselves, totally connected. our heartbeats, I have a smartwatch just cracks me up when I first saw it, you could tell me what my heart beat was, that is going to be seen as prehistoric compared to, the monitors that you could do to you and to put on yourself so that, what impacts certain activities have on your body and pre diagnostics going back to a central database that will then tell you where you might have, health issues or otherwise, and then all these industries, which are largely analog in their nature, becoming more digital, and the whole infrastructure will be much more robust as well.
Andrew Grill: Yeah, I’m with you. I have a Fitbit and it sounds like you’ve maybe got an Apple watch, so that’s even got ECG on it, but you think about it.
Let’s assume that I don’t know, a hundred million people have a smartwatch that’s able to measure heartbeat and conditions. That’s a hundred million probes. If you connect that and you allow that data to be collected, imagine we could have maybe predicted Covid because we would have seen it coming.
So I think I’m with you that we’ll actually have this data. Someone asked me as a Futurist from the stage of the day, in 50 years time, what will we see? And I think the advances in health, you may be able to predict that you’ve got it, major health issue. the challenge there is, do I want my GP to know first my insurer or both?
So I think what you’re you said though, is that the technology will help that. But I think the reason that we can talk on the internet today is because of standards. I think you’re right. It’s so important that we maintain the standards bodies that keep all the technology together to keep the costs down. One final thing if you had a magic wand and you could wave your wand and change anything in the mobile industry today, except the Government decision, what would that be?
Jeremy Thompson: Can’t I change the Government decision?
Andrew Grill: That’s beyond the magic that I have today.
Jeremy Thompson: Change anything in the mobile industry? I think the single most important thing that we need to make sure doesn’t change if I can use it that way is the splintering of the standards. I would say that our future is much brighter together than separate and, whatever politics is going on at the moment, geopolitics trade wars, I think the most important thing for us is we maintain that future, with a global standard, and that we cooperate in the development of future generations as we have done in the past, and we realise the benefits that we can see through the next generations, so wishing something doesn’t happen as opposed to wishing something does happen.
But if we continue with the way we’re going, I think we’ll be much stronger going forward.
Andrew Grill: Final question Jeremy, how can people find out more about Huawei and what you’re doing here in the UK?
Jeremy Thompson: We have a website we distribute our devices through the high street and our customer base is the household names, Vodafone, BT, and others. We also invest a lot in research and development in the UK, through universities and, quite frankly knowing what Huawei does, you better come talking to us rather than necessarily reading what’s been in the papers. But we’re here, we’re committed and we’re, we’ll look forward to servicing the UK.
Jeremy I’ve really enjoyed our discussion. You’ve been very open and honest and frank and I’ve loved the discussion about you as a leader and the whole work from home and everything else. Thank you so much for your time and stay safe.
Thank you, Andrew.
Really appreciate it. Great to talk to you.