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‘Call me an Apple fan’: Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei maintains admiration for US tech giant as their new 5G handsets go head-to-head in world’s biggest smartphone market

  • Huawei CEO Ren said he was against ‘xenophobia’ towards any foreign brand and sees Apple as a valuable teacher
  • He indicated that Huawei studies ‘why Apple products are so good’, which enables the Shenzhen-based company to see the gap between the two firms

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Ren Zhengfei, founder and chief executive of Huawei Technologies, sees Apple as “a teacher”. Photo: Kyodo
Iris Dengin Shenzhen
Huawei Technologies founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei maintains that he is “a fan” of Apple, despite intense competition between the US-blacklisted Chinese company and the American tech giant in the world’s biggest smartphone market.

Ren said he was against “xenophobia” towards any foreign brand and sees Apple as a valuable teacher, the 78-year-old Chinese technology entrepreneur told university students and academics who took part in the Huawei-sponsored International Collegiate Programming Contest held last month.

“We often explore why Apple’s products are so good, and we can also see the gap between us and Apple,” Ren said, according to a memo of his talk that was published on Tuesday in the event’s website.

“I’m very happy to have a teacher that gives us the opportunity to learn and compare [our performance],” he said. “In that sense, it would not be an exaggeration to call me an Apple fan.”

03:19

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Ren indicated that his daughter used Apple products when she was studying in the US, in an apparent reference to youngest daughter Annabel Yao who was a Harvard University student from 2016 to 2020.
He had expressed his admiration for Apple during an interview in May 2019, when he described the Cupertino, California-based company as “an example we look up to in terms of privacy protection”.
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