LAUSR

Huawei is one of China’s most prominent multinational corporations (MNCs). As Huawei has been caught in the middle of a geopolitical struggle between China and the USA, Huawei received disproportionate attention in the Western press since 2018 when the US government stepped up its efforts to persuade other Western countries to ban Huawei’s 5G technology from their telecommunication infrastructures. We have been researching the development of Huawei into an MNC for several years, analyzing how Huawei managed to grow from 50 employees in 1987 to over 194,000 employees today (Huawei, 2019). Our findings recently came out in a book entitled The Management Transformation of Huawei: From Humble Beginnings to Global Leadership (Wu, Murmann, Huang, & Guo, 2020). Like Yan, Hu, and Dong (2021), we have been impressed by Huawei’s ability to transform itself. In our commentary, we will first consider Yan et al.’s (2021) article ‘Managing Complementary Assets to Build Cross-Functional Ambidexterity: The Transformation of Huawei Mobile’ and then Hong and Snell’s (2021) article ‘Headquarters Control and Its Legitimation in a Chinese Multinational Corporation: The Case of Huawei’. Because the articles have such a different focus, it makes sense to treat them individually and conclude with reflections that apply to both.