Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei seeks employee input on business direction amid struggle to reinvent company under US sanctions
- Ren Zhengfei said ‘Huawei’s strategy should not be decided by a handful of people’ but rather ‘come from tens of thousands of experts’
- Huawei is struggling to find a revenue source that matches the profitability of its once-thriving smartphone business
Ren Zhengfei, founder of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co, has called for employees to contribute ideas about the company’s future direction, according to an internal memo, as the company struggles to remake itself after US sanctions crippled its smartphone business.
Despite venturing into multiple business fronts from coal mining to car systems, the Shenzhen-based company with its 195,000-strong staff worldwide has yet to find a steady revenue source that can match the profitability of its once-lucrative smartphone unit.
According to an internal memo showing Ren’s discussions with employees last month, the CEO asked Huawei’s scientists and experts to hold cross-disciplinary discussions and “speak freely” about which direction the company should be headed. The memo was published on Huawei’s employees’ forum on Monday.
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“Huawei’s strategy should not be decided by a handful of people … it should come from tens of thousands of experts who study our future direction and the path to get there,” Ren said, urging Huawei’s 6,000 experts and hundreds of thousands of engineers to join the discussions, alongside external scientists and consultants.
Ren said the ideas raised should be conducive to “value creation”.
