![]() He slept outdoors in weather as cold as -28 C (-18 F). “This wasn’t inevitable.”Īfter studying engineering, Ren joined the army in the 1960s and was sent to the northeast to build a textile factory. “Poverty didn’t give me the elements for success,” he said. When I was young, my ambition was to have more steamed buns, because we didn’t have enough,” Ren said. “Don’t think that when I was a child, I had a grand ideal. He said if he hadn’t gone to university, he could have been a champion pig breeder or run a noodle factory. Ren credits his success to his focus on detail, not his upbringing. The Hurun Report, which follows China’s wealthy, says his net worth is still $3 billion, up 25% from 2018. Huawei says Ren’s ownership has declined to 1.14% as more shares were distributed to employees. Ren says the company has no outside owners, government or private. “His mother’s ‘meal system’ had a big impact on him.”įollowing that ethos, Huawei says it is owned by the Chinese citizens who make up half its workforce of 180,000. Ren’s mother declared no one would die and divided each meal into nine portions, one for each family member, Tian said. At least 30 million people died in the 1959-61 famine that followed. When Ren was a teenager, the ruling party embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous campaign to become an industrial power overnight. ![]() His father was criticized as a capitalist and at one point was confined in a cow barn. Ren was raised by a schoolteacher who he said fed seven children on a monthly wage of 40 yuan ($6). Tian Tao, co-author of “The Huawei Story,” says Huawei’s corporate culture stems from Ren’s upbringing in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest regions. “He talks about survival all the time: Make sure to survive.” “He is still quite important in dictating that urgency,” Peng said. He writes letters urging employees to “prepare for the worst,” said Nicole Peng of Canalys, an industry research firm. They navigated a shifting, state-dominated landscape, overcoming shortages of money and technology to create industries that are now expanding abroad.ĭespite his success, Ren talks like a struggling rookie, worrying aloud that employees might get too comfortable. He belongs to the generation of entrepreneurs who founded communist-era China’s first private companies in the 1980s. The escalating clash with Washington has transformed Ren from an admired but rarely seen businessman worth an estimated $3 billion into one of China’s most prominent figures. technology to Huawei and urging European and other allies to shun the company as they prepare to roll out next-generation telecom networks. The Trump administration stepped up pressure this year by imposing curbs on sales of U.S. accusations the company might facilitate Chinese spying. Ren and his company already have spent nearly a decade fighting U.S. ![]() charges she helped to violate sanctions against Iran. There is a personal dimension to the latest episode: Ren’s daughter, Huawei’s chief financial officer, is under arrest in Canada on U.S. “For three decades, Huawei has been suffering and no joy,” Ren said in an interview. ![]() He sees American pressure as just the latest in a string of tests that have hardened him and his company. He has survived competition that drove Western rivals out of the market, brushes with financial disaster and job stress so severe he contemplated suicide. The billionaire entrepreneur embroiled in the Trump administration’s fight with China over technology is a 75-year-old former army engineer who worked his way out of childhood poverty. sanctions and warnings that it is a security risk. ![]() mobilizes against the latest threat to its success: U.S. Now, Ren is shedding that anonymity as Huawei Technologies Ltd. For decades, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei stayed out of sight as his company grew to become the biggest maker of network gear for phone carriers and surpassed Apple as the No. ![]()
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