Li Moumou

A native of Zhenning County, Anshun City, Guizhou Province, he graduated from Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering and is the founder of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

In 2018, he was named to the “List of 100 Outstanding Private Entrepreneurs over the 40 Years of Reform and Opening-Up” compiled by the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. He was also recognized as a “China Economic News Figure of the Year” in 2019 and included on Forbes magazine’s “Business Leader of the Year: Global Business Executive” list that same year.

He has been recognized on prestigious lists such as TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, the 100 Outstanding Private Entrepreneurs of China’s 40 Years of Reform and Opening-Up, the 50 Most Influential Business Leaders in China, and the Asia’s Top 100 Business Figures.

In September 1991, Huawei leased the third floor of the Industrial Building in Haoye Village, Bao’an County, Shenzhen, to use as a facility for developing stored-program-controlled switches. More than fifty young employees followed Ren Zhengfei to this dilapidated factory building, embarking on an arduous and uncertain entrepreneurial journey. They divided the entire floor into four work sections—single-board assembly, power supply, final testing, and preparation—along with a storage room and a kitchen. Under the scorching heat of the equipment, they worked around the clock, day and night, designing and fabricating circuit boards, assembling call-handling consoles, soldering circuits, writing software, and then debugging, revising, and re-debugging again. In such demanding conditions, Ren Zhengfei visited the site almost every day to inspect production and development progress, convene meetings to discuss the challenges at hand, and assign tasks and coordinate solutions to a wide range of problems. When it was time for meals, Ren Zhengfei and the company’s leadership would join everyone for a communal dinner at a street-side food stall…