Huawei History - Used to Sell Switches

If we were to talk about the brand Huawei, it seems to be one of the most controversial brands as of now and pretty much a lot of things have been going on in Huawei.

Huawei is the brand that has been getting a lot of attention for the past 5 years in terms of the company's sales to the extent of challenging its main players like Apple and Samsung.

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But do you actually know the history behind Huawei and how it all started?

The company's founder, Ren Zhengfei has gone through hardship to start his company together with his friends. He managed to set an outstanding achievement that can inspire many entrepreneurs out there who think they went through it all.

Born during World War 2

Ren Zhengfei is a former ex-soldier that was born in 1944. His family was rather poor during that time and he lives in the countryside called Guizhou where most people who are unfortunate like him also live. Even though he is considered poor, he is also lucky since both of his parents are teachers, unlike the others.

When I say lucky, I mean he is still able to have a taste of a pinch of salt in his food, unlike other families that lived in that area. But still, I wouldn't say that he is wealthy either. He is the one and only in his family to have the opportunity to further his studies at a university.

He entered his university life in the year 1963 in the field, of civil engineering. This is where his life changes when he went from a country boy to city life. He managed to complete his studies and pursued becoming an engineer later on.

However, in 1974 at the age of 30, he made the decision of joining the Chinese army. It was total chaos at that moment of time since food and clothing supplies were rather scarce.

Chinese lab was like 'finding a needle in a haystack'

After joining the army, Ren Zhengfei was assigned to construct a chemical factory for the production of textiles in the northeast of Liaoyang. This was to support the lack of supplies at that time.

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Liaoyang is a small isolated city with very cold weather. It is so cold to the extent that water in an open container can simply freeze in mere minutes. Ren Zhengfei was considered a genius among the workers there and that's what made people call him by the name Ren-Tech.

After his service with the Chinese army ended, his real working life started when he got a job as an engineer at an oil and gas company. Things did not turn out well for him since he did not manage to achieve the objectives of the company and he was fired instantly. This is due to him being incompetent for the job since his skills were rather useless for the job scope.

The Start of Huawei

He then decided to start up his own company known as Huawei in the year 1987 when he was 44 years old with a small capital of $3000. He also asked a lot of investors to invest together with him but pretty much all of them turn down on him as they were not confident with the idea presented by Ren Zheng.

Similar to other tech giants like Alibaba, Huawei also first started in a small apartment. At first, Huawei was selling switches and this company became the middleman in selling the switches. The switch was taken from a supplier based in Hong Kong.

It was proven that Huawei managed to sell the switches commercially and with this success, something unfortunate also happens to Huawei. The switch supplier also decided to not deal anymore with Huawei since they think that Huawei has dominated the market.

Huawei was forced to produce its very own switch due to this problem.

This has led to Huawei doing their own research to produce their own switch to continue their usual business. They did not think of whether it will be a failure or not since it should all be focused on producing the best switch out there.

They finally managed to produce the best switch aside from selling it at a very cheap price, below the market price. That was the point of time when everything changes for Huawei and they are one step towards achieving success.

Biggest Telecommunication Company

Huawei is very different now since it is one of the tech giants focused on producing components related to telecommunication which includes infrastructures for 5G. A lot of companies in Europe and the United States of America have used the components produced by Huawei in their telecommunication system.

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Regardless of all those successes, there are also controversies going on at a global level involving the United States of America.

America has accused Huawei of spying on their citizens with the technology produced by them. Even though there was no concrete proof of this accusation, they still accused Huawei of doing in addition to telling all their allies to boycott Huawei products.

The pinnacle of this crisis started in the previous year when google was forced to end its partnership with Huawei due to pressure from the government in relation to the 5G technology.

Not just Google but Microsoft also end their ties with Huawei since the pressure keeps on coming from the Trump administration.

This has resulted in Huawei building its own operating software and not being too reliant on Google for the buildup of its future smartphone.

Currently, Huawei has dominated the 5G technology regardless of being hindered by the United States of America. This has not stopped Huawei from leading the technology industry and they managed to build their very own software.

What do you guys think of Huawei and its technologies?

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