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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.
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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.
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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.
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