Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Leadership History
5 leaders · 1988 to present
Ren Zhengfei is the CEO of Huawei, in the role since 1988.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Wang (Wang Tao) | Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman | 2026 | Present | < 1 |
| Sabrina Meng (Meng Wanzhou) | Deputy Chairwoman, Rotating Chair, and CFO | 2023 | Present | 3 |
| Xu Zhijun (Eric Xu) | Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman | 2011 | Present | 15 |
| Sun Yafang | Chairwoman | 1999 | 2018 | 19 |
| Ren Zhengfei | Director and Chief Executive Officer | 1988 | Present | 38 |
Huawei is a Shenzhen-based maker of telecom networks, smartphones, and digital infrastructure. It is owned by its employees through a trade-union shareholding scheme, led by founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei alongside a rotating chair, and reported ~$122 billion (CNY 880.9 billion) in 2025 revenue. It remains on the U.S. Entity List and is barred or restricted from 5G networks in several Western countries. The company is headquartered in Shenzhen, China.
Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman
2026 – Present
0 years (current)
Wang leads Huawei's massive $20 billion annual R&D budget, focusing aggressively on 5.5G networks and indigenous semiconductor design to bypass US sanctions.
He manages the critical ICT Infrastructure division, ensuring Huawei remains the dominant supplier of telecommunications equipment in the Chinese domestic market.
Deputy Chairwoman, Rotating Chair, and CFO
2023 – Present
3 years (current)
Meng oversaw the complete overhaul of Huawei's global financial accounting systems, aligning them with international standards to facilitate the company's rapid global expansion.
As CFO and Rotating Chairwoman (and daughter of the founder), she became the public face of the US-China trade war during her three-year house arrest in Canada, returning to China in 2021 as a national hero.
Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman
2011 – Present
15 years (current)
Xu drove Huawei's massive expansion into cloud computing and heavily pushed the development of the company's autonomous driving systems for domestic Chinese automakers.
As a Rotating Chairman, he oversees the company's strategic pivot toward high-margin enterprise services and AI infrastructure to offset the massive loss of global smartphone revenue.
Chairwoman
1999 – 2018
19 years
Served as chairwoman.
Sun Yafang served as Chairwoman of Huawei from 1999 to 2018. She played a pivotal role in establishing Huawei's human resources and marketing departments, establishing international partnerships, and serving as the key public representative of the company globally while founder Ren Zhengfei maintained a lower profile.
Director and Chief Executive Officer
1988 – Present
38 years (current)
Ren Zhengfei established Huawei with CNY 21,000 in 1987 and became its chief executive officer in 1988. Huawei's official biography states that he has held the CEO title continuously since then.
Huawei describes a collective governance model in which the board is the highest body responsible for corporate strategy and operations and rotating chairs lead the board for six-month terms. Those rotating-chair roles are distinct from Ren's CEO office and are not counted as separate CEOs.
Huawei's main challenges are U.S. export controls that block access to EUV lithography, leading-edge foundry capacity, and advanced memory; exclusion from 5G networks in several Western countries; persuading developers outside China to support HarmonyOS NEXT, which no longer runs Android apps; and profitability, after H1 2026 net profit fell 36% even as revenue rose 9.6%.
Ren Zhengfei is the founder and CEO of Huawei Technologies. An engineering graduate who served in the People's Liberation Army engineering corps, Ren founded Huawei in 1987 at age 43, transforming a small reseller of telephone switches into a global ICT leader.
Established in 2011, Huawei's rotating leadership system features three rotating chairmen (Eric Xu, Ken Hu, and Sabrina Meng Wanzhou) who each serve as top operational leader for a six-month term, ensuring collective decision-making and preventing leadership stagnation.
Sabrina Meng Wanzhou is the Deputy Chairwoman, Chief Financial Officer, and Rotating Chairwoman of Huawei (and daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei). She modernized Huawei's global financial management systems and gained global prominence during her three-year legal detention in Canada (2018 to 2021).
Eric Xu is a Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman who has driven Huawei's strategic investments in artificial intelligence (Ascend/MindSpore strategy), autonomous driving systems, and the Huawei Cloud enterprise expansion.
Ken Hu is a Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman of Huawei, playing a central role in guiding global commercial strategy, carrier business expansion, digital inclusion initiatives (TECH4ALL), and cyber security risk governance.
Richard Yu is the Chairman of the Consumer BG and Chairman of Intelligent Automotive Solution BU. He led Huawei's consumer mobile division from an obscure OEM maker into the world's #1 smartphone shipper (briefly in 2020) and created the HIMA smart car alliance.
Ren Zhengfei is famous for his crisis-awareness essays (such as 'Huawei's Winter' and 'Passing the Cold to Everyone'), continually warning employees against complacency and advocating that corporate survival depends on engineering rigor and customer dedication.
Huawei's 17-member Board of Directors is elected by the Representatives' Commission of employee shareholders, overseeing corporate strategy, while an independent Supervisory Board monitors financial health, executive conduct, and compliance.
Founder Ren Zhengfei is the absolute ultimate authority as CEO. However, to manage the massive empire, Huawei operates a highly unique "Rotating Chairman" system, where three elite executives take turns leading the company for six months at a time. His daughter, Meng Wanzhou, serves as CFO (and was famously detained in Canada for three years on US extradition charges).
Compare executive leadership tenures and strategic transitions
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