Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei says ‘There’s no way the U.S. can crush us’

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has said “there’s no way the US can crush” the company, in an exclusive interview with the BBC. Mr. Ren also described the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou as politically motivated.

“There’s no way the US can crush us,” he said to the BBC‘s Karishma Vaswani. “The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit.”

Huawei P30 series will be unveiled on March 26

Mr. Ren acknowledged that the potential loss of custom could have a significant impact.

He warned that “the world cannot leave us because we are more advanced”.

“If the lights go out in the West, the East will still shine. And if the North goes dark, there is still the South. America doesn’t represent the world. America only represents a portion of the world.”

On the possibility of a UK ban, Mr. Ren said:

Huawei “won’t withdraw our investment because of this. We will continue to invest in the UK.”

“We still trust in the UK, and we hope that the UK will trust us even more.

“We will invest even more in the UK. Because if the US doesn’t trust us, then we will shift our investment from the US to the UK on an even bigger scale.”

On his daughter’s arrest:

“Firstly, I object to what the US has done. This kind of politically motivated act is not acceptable.

“The US likes to sanction others, whenever there’s an issue, they’ll use such combative methods.

“We object to this. But now that we’ve gone down this path, we’ll let the courts settle it.”

On Chinese government spying:

Mr. Ren said that allowing spying was a risk he wouldn’t take.

“The Chinese government has already clearly said that it won’t install any backdoors. And we won’t install backdoors either.

“We’re not going to risk the disgust of our country and of our customers all over the world, because of something like this.

“Our company will never undertake any spying activities. If we have any such actions, then I’ll shut the company down.”