Ren Zhengfei and the expensive art of waiting

Before there was a Huawei phone, there was a missing instrument. Ren Zhengfei was helping build a synthetic-fiber factory in Liaoyang when the team needed a device to test its equipment. A technician who had seen something similar abroad described it to him. Ren worked backwards from the description, using mathematics to design a version of his own. Then he took his reasoning to a university professor and asked whether it held up.

The professor, Li Shijiu, confirmed the inference. The instrument was built. Recalling the episode decades later, Ren presented his invention with considerably less ceremony than it had received at the time: publicity had made a small piece of work into a large achievement. It helped bring him to China’s National Science Conference in 1978. His preferred description of himself in those years was “a complete technical geek”.

It is a useful place to begin with someone whose name now appears in arguments about chips, national security and the balance of power. Here, the task was specific. Something needed measuring. Someone had to understand enough to make the measurement possible. Ren’s later arguments about education and research return to that same dependence on knowledge, even when the sums have acquired several more zeros.

An apprenticeship before the company

Ren was born in 1944 and grew up in mountainous Guizhou, with two schoolteachers for parents. In 1963 he entered the Chongqing Institute of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Civil engineering work followed. In 1974 he joined the military’s Engineering Corps for the Liaoyang factory project, serving as a technician, engineer and eventually deputy director. The title carried a professional equivalence to a deputy regimental chief, without military rank.

His early technical life also belonged to the politics of its period. His father’s treatment during the Cultural Revolution affected Ren’s prospects of entering the Communist Party. He eventually joined in 1978 and attended its national congress in 1982. He has publicly acknowledged that membership. His biography cannot be tidied into a business fable with the political circumstances removed.

The Engineering Corps was disbanded, and Ren left the army in 1983. He then worked at the Shenzhen South Sea Oil Corporation’s logistics service base. Dissatisfaction with that job preceded the decision to establish Huawei in 1987, with CNY21,000 in capital. He took the CEO title in 1988. The founder had already accumulated a working life before he accumulated a company.

That late start gives his story a different rhythm from the familiar undergraduate-with-an-idea account. By his early forties, Ren had experienced institutions, construction projects and technical problems whose answers could be checked. Entrepreneurship asked for additional skills. Having a sound calculation was one thing; persuading a customer, paying a supplier and keeping a business alive were another.

Selling switches, learning to stay

Huawei’s early business involved reselling telephone switches from Hong Kong. It moved toward developing its own equipment, finding customers in rural markets. The setting matters: telecommunications was a practical business of making connections, with buyers who needed systems to work after the salesman had gone home. Ren’s career became tied to the less photogenic parts of the digital world.

The move into manufacturing and research also brought financial strain. Accounts of those early years describe Ren eating and living at the factory with employees, and making soup in the evening. The soup is a pleasing interruption to the language of corporate strategy. A founder could discuss technology all day; people still had to eat before they could discuss it again.

Growth required lessons from abroad as well as work at home. In 2019 Ren explicitly credited American suppliers and consultants, including IBM and Accenture, with helping Huawei learn how to operate. That admission complicates the picture of a company built in splendid isolation. Ren described relationships with people who had taught it procedures, supplied components and helped it become a more orderly business.

The accumulated company is much larger than its founding story. Huawei’s April 2026 fact sheet lists 213,000 employees and operations in more than 170 countries and regions. Those figures represent colleagues and customers Ren could never personally know. A founder’s habits can travel through an organization; his personal attention has a rather stricter limit.

The rival in the family’s pocket

When tensions with the United States intensified in 2019, Ren refused an easy opportunity to turn consumer choice into a loyalty test. Some of his family used iPhones. He opposed the idea of China retaliating against Apple and described the American company as a teacher. Competition, in that telling, did not cancel the obligation to learn from somebody else.

The anecdote is funny partly because of the job description. A phone company founder has an unusually good reason to want his family to choose the house brand. Ren allowed a more ordinary explanation: people buy products they like. His remarks leave room for a customer to be a customer, even when the brand has become a national talking point.

His international argument had a harder backdrop. The United States added Huawei to the Entity List in May 2019, imposing export-license requirements. American officials raised national-security concerns; Huawei denied that it served as a vehicle for spying. Ren’s military past and Party membership became central to scrutiny of his company. Neither his charm in an interview nor a functioning piece of equipment could settle that political dispute.

His responses could be dry. Talking to CBS, he thanked the United States for making the Huawei name better known. In an Associated Press interview that August, he said customers worried about security should hold off on buying its equipment. The humor and the invitation were parts of his public defense, delivered while restrictions were altering the practical terms of doing business.

In a Sky News conversation he also entertained a less comfortable possibility: separation from American science and technology could eventually cause decline. It was a revealing qualification to his confident talk of survival. A company can produce substitutes for particular parts while still losing something through diminished access to ideas. For Ren, the benefits of exchange extended beyond the next shipment.

What the long hours left out

Ren’s daughter Meng Wanzhou is Huawei’s chief financial officer and one of its rotating chairs. Her prominence brings the family into the corporate story, but his account of fatherhood is less polished than a succession portrait. He has spoken plainly about being absent when his children were growing up. During military service, he said, he was away for eleven months of the year.

Building Huawei did not suddenly return that time to the household. He described long days at work and lengthy business trips. The explanation is familiar to anyone who has promised that an intense period will end once things become a little more settled. In a growing company, the definition of settled has a habit of moving further down the road.

“I feel I owe my children a lot,” he said in 2019. In the same conversation, he described supporting his youngest daughter Annabel Yao’s interests and her wish to publish a family photograph. His reasoning was practical as well as affectionate: forcing a choice on her would make him responsible for the unhappiness it might cause. He wanted her to take charge of her own direction.

There is no need to turn the admission into a lesson with a cheerful ending. Time spent away remains time spent away. What makes it worth hearing is the gap it opens between the founder’s public achievement and his private assessment. He could account for the expansion of a business and still recognize a debt that its balance sheet would never record.

“I feel I owe my children a lot.”Ren Zhengfei, 2019

A company beyond one person

Huawei’s governance gives the founder another reason to think beyond his own presence. The company uses collective leadership and rotating chairs. Its published governance principles say its fate cannot be tied to one individual. Ren remains CEO and a director, within an organization that assigns authority across boards and committees rather than explaining every decision through his name.

Ownership also resists the usual shorthand. Huawei describes itself as employee-owned through its holding-company structure and employee shareholding scheme. At the end of 2025, it reported 169,054 participating employees and retired beneficiaries, with Ren’s investment accounting for nearly 0.59 percent of total share capital. That percentage should not be mistaken for a complete measure of the founder’s influence.

The distinction is useful for a personal profile. Calling something Ren’s company can describe its origins and the stamp of his thinking. It does not adequately describe its daily machinery. The small factory story contains a person making soup; the present organization contains people who must make decisions without waiting for that person to enter the room.

The budget that cannot promise a date

By June 2025, Ren was making a public case for research whose usefulness might take decades to become visible. He described roughly CNY180 billion in annual research and development spending: about CNY60 billion for basic theoretical work without performance assessments, and about CNY120 billion for product development that was assessed. These were his approximate figures at that moment, rather than the final accounts for the year.

The division makes his idea concrete. Products need deadlines, costs and tests. An inquiry into an underlying principle may fail to offer any convenient date for its conclusion. Ren argued that people who do not understand a scientist’s work should be cautious about judging it. The industrialist who needs something shipped was asking for room in which nothing had yet become shippable.

Huawei’s subsequent 2025 annual report put total R&D expenditure at CNY192.3 billion, or 21.8 percent of revenue. Revenue reached CNY880.9 billion, growing 2.2 percent. The slower pace of sales growth is part of the picture too. Spending on the future does not spare a company the constraints of the present, and the research budget cannot guarantee the result its author hopes to buy.

Ren also acknowledged in that June interview that Huawei’s individual chips remained a generation behind American counterparts, while arguing that mathematics and cluster computing could help compensate. The acknowledgment matters alongside the ambition. It describes an engineer looking for a workable route around a constraint, rather than declaring the constraint abolished.

The missing instrument in Liaoyang had an answer that could be built and tested. The later questions are larger, their timetables less obliging. Ren keeps asking for education, scientific exchange and the patience to support people whose work few others understand. After nearly four decades with Huawei, he is still defending the space between needing an answer and knowing enough to produce one.