10:30 AM -- Among the many questions often asked about Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is: Who owns it?
The official answer is that it is a "private company wholly owned by its employees." The Chinese vendor runs an Employee Shareholding Scheme and, according to its latest annual report (published in April), 65,596 staff were engaged in the scheme at the end of 2011.
Now, there's no shortage of people who speculate (without evidence) that Huawei is owned by the Chinese government or even the Chinese army.
Far more interesting, though, is a recent report by Chinese business publication Caijing into the ways in which Huawei's employee share scheme has been working. The report was so interesting that copies of a recent issue were allegedly pulled from distribution only days after hitting the newsstands.
The full story about that, and what the Caijing report suggested, can be found in this Week in China article, No stranger to controversy.
Questions about Huawei's ownership will no doubt be raised numerous times in the coming months as investigations into the company by the House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee and the European Commission continue. (See More Chinese Whispers and Euronews: EC Sharpens Knives Over Huawei, ZTE.)
— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading
