Wen | Zhao Yanqiu Zhou Luping
Editor| Wang Feifei
At 11:00 p.m. on April 1, Digital Intelligence Frontline noticed that Huawei's official website updated the position of management. Meng Wanzhou was elected as Huawei's rotating chairman, while Guo Ping, the former rotating chairman, stepped down to serve as chairman of the supervisory board. On March 28, Meng Wanzhou appeared at Huawei Group's annual financial report, which was her first official appearance after returning to China last year, and it was Guo Ping who attended with her.
The news of Meng Wanzhou's position change was circulated within the company in the evening of the same day.
For this change, some Huawei employees told Digital Intelligence Frontline that because it was carried out quietly at night, the announcement or document had not yet been seen, and many employees within the company did not know it. ”
For the change of Meng Wanzhou's position, some employees said that they were not surprised. But will Meng Wanzhou become the successor? Several employees said that although Meng Wanzhou has a good financial background, the shortcomings are also very obvious, and he has not done technical and market work, while at Huawei, the company emphasizes "customer-centric" every day.
"Maybe in the future, we will be able to achieve the position of chairman." One employee speculated on the digital intelligence front that the chairman of Huawei is now Liang Hua, who was previously Huawei's CFO and was replaced by Meng Wanzhou after he stepped down as Huawei's CFO in 2011.
On Huawei's official website, the top four members of the board of directors
It's not just Meng Wanzhou that has changed
However, Huawei's board of directors is still presiding over the rotating chairman Hu Houkun, and Meng Wanzhou's earliest rotation period needs to be until April 1, 2023.
According to Huawei's official website, Huawei exercises collective leadership at the governance level, and the board of directors is the highest responsible body for the company's strategy, operation management, and customer satisfaction. The Board of Directors and the Standing Committee of the Board of Directors shall be presided over by the Rotating Chairman, who shall be the top manager of the Company during the period of his or her duties, and the rotating chairman shall be held for a period of six months.
In addition to Meng Wanzhou and Guo Ping, four huawei executives have also changed their positions on the board, leaving the board and entering the board of supervisors. According to Huawei's official website, the Board of Supervisors, also known as the Company Supervision Committee, is the company's supervisory organ, juxtaposed with the board of directors, equivalent to the judicial part of the separation of powers in politics, which supervises the company's decision-making. The Supervisory Board is responsible to and reports to the Shareholders' Meeting. The Supervisory Board is composed of supervisors, and the company laws of different countries have specific provisions.
Some Huawei employees told Digital Intelligence Frontline that within the company, for most ordinary employees, the board of directors is more noticeable, but the role of the board of supervisors is not well understood. This change, in the eyes of some grass-roots employees, is more like the "elders" or old people who entered the board of supervisors in the entrepreneurial period with Ren Zhengfei to "escort" the company, and also has the meaning of the replacement of the management team.
One of the people who changed was Ding Yun. In Huawei's financial report released on March 28, 2022, Ding Yun is also the managing director and the president of Huawei operator BG. But in the latest list released by Huawei's official website, Ding Yun is no longer a director of Huawei, but a vice chairman of the board of supervisors.
The second is Chen Lifang, who is in charge of public and government affairs, and is no longer a director of Huawei, but instead serves as Huawei's executive supervisor.
The other two who are no longer on huawei board are Peng Zhongyang, president of BG, and Yao Fuhai, who is responsible for group procurement, both of whom have turned to supervisors.
In addition to the above four, Huawei's alternate directors Li Jianguo and Bloomberg have been regularized and entered the board of directors. Bloomberg is currently Vice President of Public and Government Affairs at Huawei, and Jianguo Li is President of Huawei's Manufacturing Division.
With Meng Wanzhou's election as rotating chairman and the addition of several board members, Huawei's management has also begun to replace the old and new. However, the discussion about whether Meng Wanzhou will become Ren Zhengfei's successor has once again entered people's field of vision.
Entering Huawei at the age of 21, Meng Wanzhou was called "gentle"
Meng Wanzhou was born in Sichuan in 1972 and is the eldest daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei.
When Meng Wanzhou entered Huawei in the 1990s, Huawei was still a small company. According to media reports, she and three other girls undertook the work of switchboard transfer and document printing. In 1997, Meng Xiaozhou went to Huazhong University of Science and Technology to study for a master's degree.
Ren Zhengfei has spoken publicly about his debt to his children. "In fact, I am very sorry for children in my life, my two eldest children (Meng Wanzhou and Ren Ping), when they were young, I went to the army and could only return home once in 11 months. When I got home, they went to school during the day, did their homework at night, went to bed, and went to school again the next morning. In fact, we didn't have any communication, we didn't establish any feelings. ...... In fact, children rely on their own efforts and have high requirements for themselves. ”
In 1998, Meng Wanzhou returned to Huawei, entered the finance department, and opened the main channel of her career. For the next 10 years, she held several senior positions in the company's finance department until April 2011, when Huawei's CFO Liang Hua stepped down and Meng Wanzhou officially became Huawei's managing director and chief financial officer (CFO).
During this period, with the development of Huawei's business in the global market, Meng Wanzhou was responsible for establishing Huawei's global unified financial organization, and also led the unification and standardization of Huawei's global accounting system. In the project of Huawei's financial transformation with IBM, Meng Wanzhou urged IBM overseas experts to personally bring Huawei employees to "original" overseas experience.
During this period, Meng Wanzhou once went to Peking University and Tsinghua University to give speeches to recruit talents, and also participated in some overseas activities, but overall it was quite low-key.
In 2016, Meng Wanzhou gave a speech at Peking University
Meng Wanzhou, who has always been low-key, was first exposed in 2013. At that time, Meng Wanzhou, as Huawei's CFO, faced the media for the first time and introduced Huawei's performance in 2012. The feeling of participating in the media is that she was quite mysterious before, "very casual and easy, no shelf".
Some Huawei employees who have worked with Meng Wanzhou told Digital Intelligence Frontline that unlike some Huawei managers who criticized employees for "not giving face, or even disregarding personality", Meng Wanzhou "treats people gently" and chats with employees after work, "there is also a small woman's side". Her management is more warm, and she is also loved by her financial line employees. Chen Lifang also said in front of the media before that Wanzhou is a person full of goodwill and is willing to help with small things.
Previously, Meng Wanzhou's internal dress style in the company was also based on simplicity and comfort, "simple T-shirts and pants", which was different from its current fashionable and formal wear.
In March 2018, Meng Wanzhou was promoted to vice chairman and chief financial officer, but only nine months later, on December 1, 2018, the Canadian police arrested Meng Wanzhou, who went to Argentina for a meeting and was transferring to Vancouver, at the request of the United States, and later launched an "extradition case" to extradite Meng Wanzhou to the United States. Meng Wanzhou was placed on trust and high hopes. Even during her stay in Canada, the position of Huawei's chief financial officer has always belonged to her and has not been replaced. After unremitting efforts by the government, Meng Wanzhou finally returned to China in September 2021.
At Huawei's 2021 earnings report meeting on March 28 this year, Meng Wanzhou, who appeared at the earnings report meeting again after four years, said that his feelings about returning to China for 6 months were that "the chinese side of the cave is a day, the world has been a thousand years", and said that he was trying to learn and catch up with the rapid development of the motherland.
Huawei has long been a collective leader
Ren Zhengfei, who was born in 1944, is 78 years old this year, and if it were not for the dilemma caused by the Us crackdown on the company's life and death, he might have retreated behind the scenes or the second line like Zhang Ruimin and others in the same period. And his successor has always been a matter of great concern to the outside world.
In this round of Chinese and foreign media interviews, Ren Zhengfei was also asked repeatedly, and repeatedly denied the rumors that his children were successors.
Ren Zhengfei once publicly talked about his four-point requirements for Huawei's successor in an email to all employees:
1. Huawei's successors, in addition to the requirements of vision, character, and will, must also have a far-sighted view of value and the ability to control the commercial ecological environment;
2. Huawei's successor should have the vision of the global market pattern and the ability to execute transactions and service objectives;
3. A deep understanding of new technologies and customer needs, and the ability not to rest on its laurels;
4. Huawei's successor must also have the ability to simplify the management of the company's huge number of business flows, logistics, and capital flows end-to-end.
Ren Zhengfei also admitted in an interview that although Meng Wanzhou's horizontal management ability is very strong, as a leader, he requires vertical breakthrough ability: "To see the future in ten or twenty years, the insight into this future must be someone with a technical background." Without a technical background, he couldn't see what was going on in ten or twenty years. ”
On February 18, 2019, Ren Zhengfei said in an interview with the BBC: "Meng Wanzhou can never be a successor because she has no technical background, and I can't completely see the development trajectory of my children from my father's point of view." ”
As we all know, In addition to his two daughters, Ren Zhengfei also has a son, Ren Ping, but he left the front line of power very early to take up a position at Huawei's Huitong company. This company is mainly responsible for Huawei's travel business. But Meng Wanzhou is active in Huawei's core executives.
However, Huawei's top management has already formed a unique operating system.
In previous years' Huawei financial reports, it will be written on the first page "who controls Huawei":
Huawei has a sound internal governance structure and implements independent operation and management. Shareholding employees elect shareholding employee representative committees, shareholding employee representatives and its elected company board of directors, board of supervisors to make decisions, management and supervision of major matters of the company.
The shareholding employees elect 115 shareholding employee representatives, the shareholding employee representative council elects the chairman and 16 directors, the board elects 4 vice chairmen and 3 executive directors, and the rotating chairman is 3 vice chairmen.
The company's board of directors and the standing committee of the board of directors are presided over by the rotating chairman, who is the supreme leader of the company during the period of duty. The Supervisory Board is the supreme supervisory body of the company, exercising supervisory powers on behalf of shareholders, and its basic functions include leadership management, business review and strategic foresight.
Huawei's chairman is not responsible for the daily management of the company, more like an honorary position, previously held by Sun Yafang, and now Liang Hua. But in addition to the chairman, Huawei also has a rotating chairman position (formerly called rotating CEO), which is rotated by three vice chairmen.
In Ren Zhengfei's article "A River of Spring Water Flows Eastward", he recounted the origin of Huawei's rotating CEO: Around 2004, when the American consulting firm helped us design the company's organizational structure, it was inconceivable that Huawei did not have a central organization. Moreover, the top level is only empty appointments, not operation, proposed to establish an EMT (Executive Management Team), Ren Zhengfei did not want to be the chairman of the EMT, began the rotating chairman system, by eight leaders in turn to govern, each half a year.
Ren Zhengfei also said that perhaps this unintentional rotation system has balanced the contradictions in all aspects of the company and enabled the company to grow in a balanced way.
"The advantage of rotation is that each rotator, for a period of time, takes on the role of COO of the company, not only to deal with daily affairs, but also to prepare draft documents for high-level meetings, which greatly exercises them. At the same time, the rotator had to cut his ass smaller, otherwise he would not be able to meet the support of others for his resolution. In this way, he brought the department under his jurisdiction into the balance of global interests, and the company's hill was inadvertently flattened in the past few years. ”
After two cycles, in 2011, Huawei's rotation system evolved into a rotating CEO system. The rotating CEO is served by three vice chairmen Guo Ping, Xu Zhijun and Hu Houkun in turn, and the rotation period is still half a year per person. Ren Zhengfei said that this is better than the system of tying the company's success to one person and losing it to this person.
In 2018, the rotating CEO system was changed to rotating chairman. The previous three rotating CEOs themselves are also the positions of vice chairman of Huawei, and after the "upgrade" of the rotation system, it is guo ping, Xu Zhijun, and Hu Houkun who are three vice chairmen to take turns, and there is no obvious change in implementation.
This change is the first change in Huawei's three rotating managers in 11 years.
One reason why Huawei can maintain such a governance structure is that its executives are all old Huawei employees, who are deeply influenced and influenced by Huawei culture. At present, none of the 13 directors on the board of directors' list have been hired since 2000, and many of them are people who accompany Ren Zhengfei to fight together. The latest was Bloomberg, who joined in 1999, and has also worked at Huawei for 23 years.
Years of working together have allowed them to form such a tacit understanding. Perhaps, Huawei will no longer have such a soul figure as Ren Zhengfei, but Ren Zhengfei has designed the company's top-level system quite perfectly. In the future, regardless of whether Meng Wanzhou will take over, Huawei is a company led collectively.