Huawei founder’s plan for dealing with Apple is a breath of fresh air

Photo credit: Kārlis Dambrāns

For years, the operational playbook for domestic Chinese tech companies looking to get a leg up on the competition has been pretty simple: bash Apple. And why not? Going after Apple gets attention, and it wins fans among the legion of Chinese mobile users who, for a variety of reasons, prefer to avoid the Cupertino company.

Most Chinese firms used the battle with Apple only as a form of marketing, of course; there aren’t many Chinese companies that can actually go toe-to-toe with Tim Cook and co. One of the few that actually might stand a chance is Huawei, the massive global tech conglomerate founded by Ren Zhengfei in 1987.

Ren has been president of the company since he founded it, and he’s always been a bit different from China’s other tech founders. He’s from an older generation – Ren is 71, whereas other China’s other major industry figures are mostly in their 40s and 50s – and he has traditionally preferred to stay out of the spotlight. In some ways, he’s the anti-Jack Ma: he rarely makes appearances in public or in the media, and he’s certainly not a fountain of quotable one-liners and parables like Ma.

At a recent address on Huawei’s artificial intelligence efforts, Ren revealed that his approach to Apple is also quite different from what we hear in other corners of China’s tech industry. During the Q&A, he was asked about how Huawei had surpassed Cisco and how it planned to surpass Apple.

Here’s Ren’s response:

We never thought about surpassing Cisco, and we don’t think about surpassing Apple. When Cisco bought Ericsson, I was overjoyed. When there’s someone out front carrying the flag, I am happy to follow. Now Apple has US$200 billion in the bank; if they’re proactive, why couldn’t they merge with or acquire someone? After a merger, they could be a complete networking company, and with that much money, they’d be a hegemon.

If we want to follow behind them, why can’t we? Why should we be trying to overthrow them? That’s nonsense from the internet. Why would we want to surpass them, so that we can become the hegemon of of the world? Only two people have proclaimed themselves ruler of the world, Genghis Khan and Hitler, and they both met bitter fates in the end. We don’t need to be too antagonistic, we need to make more friends.

I’m not too sure about Ren’s history, but it’s quite refreshing to hear a founder who isn’t constantly buying into the subvert-overtake-destroy mentality, and instead is happy to follow a bigger leader as long as his own company remains healthy and profitable.

This post Huawei founder’s plan for dealing with Apple is a breath of fresh air appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/huawei-founders-plan-dealing-apple-breath-fresh-air
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