Founder of Huawei Technologies
Age: 67
Twenty-one years after Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei, his company joined Fortune's Global 500 list of the world largest companies. Ren has not yet accepted any media interviews, but some of his own articles have been widely circulated within the industry and his management philosophy has been highly praised by other industry giants. He wrote "Huawei's Winter" in 2000, which was a wake up call to the IT industry, despite the fact that Huawei's business performance was in fact outstanding at the time.
His other management approaches, such as the "Cleverness of a Wolf-like Organization Plan" and the "The Principle of Suppressing," have also influenced other business leaders. Unlike many other Chinese companies that relied on low costs to grow, Huawei has strong spirit of innovation. It invests 10% of its annual revenue in R&D and nearly half of its employees are R&D personnel. Huawei remains unlisted, but even so, it is already standing shoulder to shoulder with technology giants like Cisco.
-- Zhou ZhanhongNEXT: Wang Shi
