Welcome to one of the largest cafeterias here at Huawei.
How else do you feed nearly 60,000 employees every day?
I'm spending a day in Huawei's headquarters.
It's located in the city of Shenzhen, in an area often referred to as the Silicon Valley of China.
It's 9 a.m. and we're going for a tour of Huawei.
Where is it?
Huawei is an information and communications technology conglomerate.
It's currently the world's third-biggest smartphone-maker behind Apple and Samsung.
At one point, Huawei had even surpassed Apple for a few months in 2017.
It's also the largest telecom equipment maker in the world.
Yet, it's less known in the U.S. for a variety of reasons.
AT&T recently dropped a deal which would allow Huawei to sell in the U.S.
Several U.S. lawmakers have had long-standing security concerns about,
what they said was, Huawei's ties to the Chinese government.
And U.S. government officials recently said they would not advise Americans to use products from Huawei.
Yet the U.S. market aside, there's no denying how massive the company has become.
What started just over 30 years ago has turned into a company with more than
180,000 employees across the globe and it has annual revenue of $92 billion.
So what's it like inside one of China's massive tech companies?
The campus is sprawling with these kind of vans that take employees from
section to section in and around the campus.
Multiple 7-Elevens and mini-marts throughout campus.
It's 12:20 right now and this cafeteria in Huawei is packed.
It's a campus that has to feed nearly 60,000 people everyday.
This is just one of many cafeterias here on the campus.
In fact, if this looks big, this is nothing. This is one of three floors and there's over a dozen of these cafeterias.
Food isn't free here for employees, but it is heavily subsidized.
There's so many choices, you can get pretty much any cuisine imaginable here.
Hi! Hello!
At these registers, no one uses cash.
China is moving toward a cashless society.
So, it makes sense that people here are using mobile phones to pay.
I don't see anybody else with cash.
The cost of my lunch was about $2.50.
It's time to eat.
In parts of China's corporate culture, an afternoon nap is considered
completely normal and sure enough after lunchtime, I see a number of employees getting some shut-eye.
There's a lot of symbolism throughout the campus, one of them is these black swans.
There's three of them on the campus, which I'm told is meant to
symbolize non-complacency within the corporate culture.
Huawei says 45% of their employees are engaged in some form of research and development.
On this side of the lake, you'll see some villas.
These are used for meetings, for executives, for partners, for out-of-town guests.
Sometimes, you'll find things on this campus that seem a bit random.
I'm in a stationary train right now.
This is what's known as Huawei University. It's where employees come for
continuing education, classes, seminars, and by the looks of it, it's quite big.
The company says it offers 25,000 courses through its university program.
About a ten minute drive from the main campus, Huawei has a number of
buildings where thousands of its employees can live alone or with their families.
This city went from around 30,000 people to more than 12 million
in just about 40 years.
Because Shenzhen is such a new city, many people
who actually live here are not actually from here,
so the employee subsidized housing allows a lot of people who moved
to this part of China to live conveniently and relatively inexpensively.
There's also two hotels here.
On the ground floor, here you have a daycare, a coffee shop, massage place, grocery store,
pretty much anything you can think of.
This is presumably empty, because, well, it's two in the afternoon.
Everyone is likely at work.
And there's enough services and shops between here and the campus,
that some employees pretty much never even need to leave the Huawei ecosystem.