Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei attended a forum in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2012.
Telecom equipment giant has focused on core business for 28 years, says its chief
Ren Zhengfei, one of the best-known and richest tech tycoons in the world, is a modest man.
The 71-year-old founder and chief executive officer of Huawei Technologies Co Ltd was recently spotted standing in a long taxi queue at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport, with no chauffeurs, subordinates, and bodyguards about, who would presumably befit a man of his status.
By now, his Shenzhen-based company has grown into the world's leading telecom equipment maker that boasts a yearly revenue of 395 billion yuan ($60 billion) and a business presence in Europe, Africa, Asia and other regions.
Looking back across Huawei's development path that started 28 years ago in a shack with an initial investment of 21,000 yuan, Ren says focusing on one thing is his secret to success. "Our goal is to blaze a trail into No Man's Land in the telecom industry."
Recently, he talked to Xinhua News Agency about his business strategy, his views on innovation and Huawei's journey to a "No Man's Land". The following are edited excerpts of the interview.
Huawei has achieved robust growth despite the global economic slowdown. Why?
Firstly, Huawei has benefited a lot from the nation's political changes and Shenzhen's favorable policies. Without the reform and opening-up policy, Huawei would not have thrived.
Without the local government's efforts to clarify the ownership of private enterprises in 1987, we would not have created Huawei.
As Huawei grew up, we felt the tax burden was too heavy and lots of my colleagues proposed giving up. Then the Shenzhen government said it would not levy taxes on investments until companies managed to make profits. The policy greatly facilitated Huawei's efforts to scale up.
Secondly, we have been focusing on the telecom sector for 28 years. Back when we had just dozens of employees, we were targeting the telecom sector.
When we evolved into a company with hundreds of or even thousands of people, we were still focusing on the same thing. And this remains the same case when we currently have more than 100,000 employees. We are targeting it with "intensive bombardment".
Every year, we invest more than 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) into the telecom sector, with about 60 billion yuan on research and development, and 50 to 60 billion yuan going to marketing services.
Eventually, Huawei became a world leader in the area of big data transmission. And we propose establishing an open win-win framework, under which thousands of enterprises can work together to build the information society.
Thirdly, Huawei keeps on transforming itself by learning western corporate structures and management philosophies.
After spending 28 years on learning from the West, we have yet to go through the whole process.
