When Ren Zhengfei went to America for the first time, he prepared well. With $10,000 sewn into the lining of his jacket, the founder of Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei set off to explore the country he saw as the gateway to the global market for his young company.
It was 1997. Mr Ren, a former People’s Liberation Army officer, was 53 years old, and Huawei just 10. After first selling foreign telephone exchange switches in China and then reverse-engineering its own, the company was expanding abroad. Mr Ren’s journey included visits to Bell Labs and IBM, where he marvelled at the power of engineering and at modern management methods, and a stop in Las Vegas to wander around the casinos. The fact he had managed to carry his hidden cash through US customs unnoticed remained one of his favourite anecdotes much later.
Those memories may now acquire a bitter aftertaste: the US authorities are coming after Huawei with a vengeance. Meng Wanzhou, Mr Ren’s daughter and Huawei’s chief financial officer, was detained in Vancouver pending a decision on extradition to the US, where she would face fraud charges for allegedly tricking western banks into violating US sanctions on Iran.