The official answer has been the same for many years. Just over 1% is ‘owned’ by the founder Ren Zhengfei and just under 99% by a ‘trade union committee’ of employees. This is, of course, a nonsense.
Apparently, at the HQ, there’s a glass cabinet with a ledger on display in which are kept the names of all the separate employee ‘owners’. The author’s of the work highlighted this week, Christopher Balding of the Fulbright University Vietnam and Donald C. Clarke of the George Washington University Law School describe this record though as (most likely) a ‘Potemkin shareholder register’.
The authors agree that what employees may have is a contractual right to Huawei profits but that in no way can this agreement be conflated with the notion of ownership. So we’re back to square one; who’s the real owner?
If the trade union owns the floating 99% then ultimately, given the way trade unions work in China, that means the government own the company and it is therefore a state actor. Not so fast.
Ren Zhengfei maintains that he has ultimate veto over board decisions so it’s not a government entity after all. Convenient but his authority in this regard is not clear. He claims it’s written into company (nobody’s sure which one?) articles of association but has never made these available for verification. So, here we are again. Who’s the real owner?
The paper concludes that one thing at least is clear in this riddle inside an enigma; the employees DO NOT, even in an implicit sense, own this company and the maintenance of this fiction is patently absurd.
So who’s the real owner? Surely the elephant in the room is now pretty obvious?
Happy Sunday.
[You can read the paper in full via the following link Who Owns Huawei?]