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Exclusive | What’s it like working for Huawei? Employees speak and founder Ren Zhengfei offers some metaphors
- In this sixth instalment of an eight-part series on Huawei, Josephine Ma talks to four employees to ask what attracted them to the company
- Huawei has 194,000 staff worldwide and there are plans to increase headcount even as the Covid-19 pandemic slows economies and business demand
Reading Time:8 minutes
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Abby Zhao Yirong was offered a job by Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies in late 2018. She spent almost 10 months thinking about it.
The Chinese national was in a master’s programme in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School at the time and was expected to graduate in September 2019.
She was still in the interview process with Huawei on December 1, 2018, when Meng Wanzhou – Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei – was detained by authorities in Canada.
That was at the request of the US, which wanted Meng extradited to face allegations that she and Huawei had committed bank and wire fraud to violate Washington’s sanctions on Iran. Meng and Huawei have denied the allegations.
Zhao said when Meng’s arrest hit the news it certainly made her more cautious about the job offer in Huawei’s corporate communications department. But a month later in January 2019 she made a trip to its headquarters in Shenzhen, the country’s fast-expanding technology hub adjoining Hong Kong.
“I wanted to be here and see with my own eyes what the company is like,” she said in an interview at Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen.
Josephine Ma is China news editor and has covered China news for the Post for more than 20 years. As a correspondent in Beijing, she reported on everything from the 2003 Sars outbreak to the riots in Lhasa and the Beijing Olympics in 2008. She has been based in Hong Kong since 2009. She has a master’s degree in development studies from the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree in English language from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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