Who Owns Huawei?
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Who Owns Huawei?
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Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#2Ownership does not mean the same thing in non democratic states. The law and incorporation rules are always an approximation of what's applied in reality, but it is much more so in authoritarian states.
The real two questions are those of profit distribution and actual power, as in the ability to effect change. The latter is always constrained by the ruling party, no matter what the incorporation rules say, and no matter what the former (distribution of profits) is. It was the case in Soviet satellite countries too, except Soviet states were also harsher on profit distribution (communism).
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#3> but the myth of Huawei’s employee ownership seems to persist outside of China.
Never heard of it, never thought about it, not sure why proving/disproving this is in the author's interest.
The main curiosity regarding what the structure of Huawei actually is would be interesting, edge of my seat for that one. But who cares about the employees, who would ever believe that it would be anything other than corporate speak? I would basically assume that because a shareholder who happens to be employed there at some point in time, that the company would make that assertion just to make people feel good. The profit sharing scheme the abstract suggests is good enough to align incentives and make the non-capital class feel like they "own" something. It is so improbable that a labor class is also a capital class that I would be more surprised to see a paper showing how it was true, and it would be from Harvard Business School and not randomly uploaded to SSRN.
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#4[flagged]
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#5The most informative comment I’ve heard about Chinese business is that one needs to take the western conception of state / military / corporation and chuck them out the window. In essence these are all descriptive functions of the same entity in China, and any apparent separation is just that—apparent.
I know some may reply that, for example, Lockheed effectively lives at this nexus also. It’s a good argument, and probably similar though not exactly the same in arrangement.
To me, the most interesting difference is that China has this kind of relationship with its major players regardless of industry, not just their defense contractors. So it doesn’t matter if you make cell phones, video games, toilet seats, ship hulls, or concrete—the whole concept of an enterprise not being interdependent on the state is a non-starter there. Whether it’s happening via backchannels to party officials or through ownership schemes like this one, the concept of private and public sector is so muddy there as to be almost meaningless.
To me, this tells us a lot more about IP infringement and espionage than what we usually read, because where the west likes to conceive of corporations as competing in a market in China it’s more useful to describe corporations as tools of statecraft.
Huawei wants us to think of them as competing with Apple because they both make cellphones. In reality, it’s as though the CIA or Mossad was competing with Apple—the aims of each may in fact be orthogonal to each other because market performance is not the real driver of the company’s decisions.
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#6[flagged]
Maybe in France, but not in the US.
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#7> but the myth of Huawei’s employee ownership seems to persist outside of China. Never heard of it, never thought about it, not sure why proving/disproving this is in the author's interest. The main curiosity regarding what the structure of Huawei actually is would be interesting, edge of my seat for that one. But who cares about the employees, who would ever believe that it would be anything other than corporate spe…
> Never heard of it, never thought about it, not sure why proving/disproving this is in the author's interest.
It is in Huawei's interest to not be labelled as a state-owned or state-controlled actor. The perception of being controlled by the Chinese state is precisely why many western countries are leaning away from purchasing Huawei networking equipment for their up and coming 5G networks, and also (at least in the case of the US) advising against, and then banning, consumer electronics made by Huawei. Huawei has been trying to convince the public that it is in fact employee owned and therefore not controlled by the Chinese state by touting its "employee virtual ownership program", and the purpose of this paper appears to be to dispel that notion.
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#8Huawei responded to this study, and the author responded to Huawei's response [1]. Salient point:
> Our bottom-line conclusion about what it all means is just our opinion. If readers disagree with our conception of what employee ownership means and prefer Huawei’s, that’s their opinion. As long as everyone understands what the structure is, what label one puts on it is not ultimately that important.
[1] https://thechinacollection.org/huaweis-ownership-huaweis-sta...
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#9The interesting thing that after the paper was published Huawei launched a campaign about this topic
Re: Who Owns Huawei?
#10This Acquired podcast episode did a great job covering the rise of Huawei https://lnns.co/oPr5nUSzLxX