Although Huawei started its business as a small agent in 1987, the firm began the independent development of telecommunications equipment in its fouth year of operation and then gradually increased its R&D investments over the years. As the scale of R&D efforts increased, Huawei encountered significant problems with its organization of R&D and felt that it was necessary to transform how it conducts R&D several times over its thirty-year history. In this chapter, we develop a four-step model to analyze three major R&D management transformations in Huawei’s long history of R&D activities. The first transformation, from 1991 to 1995, helped Huawei to establish an informal R&D system; the second transformation, from 1995 to 1998, changed the informal R&D management system into a formal system with clear structures and processes; and finally, the third transformation built up a process-oriented, high-performing R&D organization. We find that although the transformations shifted Huawei’s focus from making structural changes to process changes, all of them were closely aligned with the firm’s market position and with its strategic re-orientation.

Management transformation in the financial management area has contributed significantly to the competitiveness of Huawei. Four Standardizations was the first large-scale financial management transformation project implemented in the company from 1998 to 2007. In 2007, Huawei started a more ambitious Integrated Financial Services project with assistance from IBM consultants, which lasted until 2014. This chapter documents the background, motivation, activities and impacts of these two financial management transformation projects and discusses Huawei’s experience in successfully implementing management transformation in the financial area. It also highlights that Huawei’s employee ownership and financial management strategy with its own characteristics determine the focus of the financial management transformation projects.

This chapter documents how Huawei transformed its supply chain management over the past two decades. We argue that Huawei’s supply chain management transformation can be divided into two stages: the establishment of an integrative supply chain from 1999 to 2003 and the establishment of a global supply chain from 2005 to the present. In the integrative supply chain management transformation project, IBM consultants helped Huawei identify problems in its operational processes, IT system and organizational structure. Subsequently, Huawei addressed these problems through process reengineering, an integrated IT system, and organizational change management, respectively. In the global supply chain management transformation phase, Huawei first promoted the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in overseas subsidiaries and representative offices by tailoring the system to local laws, regulations and customer requirements and then made efforts to build an integrated global supply chain network.

To facilitate its rapid growth over the past thirty years and build an increasingly capable management team and workforce, Huawei made substantial changes to its HR practices. As the number of employees increased, the firm faced different challenges in recruiting, developing, and motivating employees while broadening its geographic focus from China to all corners of the globe. To accurately describe the changes Huawei made to address these challenges, we divide the history of Huawei’s HR system into five distinct stages that we call (1) personnel management, (2) the beginning of human resource management, (3) strategic human resource management, (4) international human resource management, and (5)talent management. With the help of Western consulting firms, Huawei imported many Western HR practices and combined them with the Chinese tradition of cultivating a strong commitment to a large organization. Huawei also adapted Western ideas. For example, it required employees to pay for their own training costs at the company university.

Huawei by 2014 had become the largest patent filer in the world even though it did not file any patents for the first eight years of its existence (1987–1994). This chapter examines the development of the firm’s intellectual property (IP) management capability. It describes important changes that Huawei undertook both in terms of its IP strategy (whether, when, where, and in what technical areas to patent) and the administration of its IP activities. Unlike the other major transformations that Huawei undertook with the help of Western consulting firms, Huawei could not make up its mind about how it was going to manage its IP strategy until a lawsuit filed in 2003 by a US competitor, Cisco, prompted top management to devote significant attention to this area. To support its internationalization strategy, Huawei subsequently implemented a systematic strategy to create a vast collection of independent intellectual property in telecommunication technology. Starting in 2003, Huawei embarked on a series of five-year plans, first to increase the amount of IP that would be generated by its large R&D efforts and later to increase the quality of its IP. To realize this strategy, large changes in the organization of the IP office had to be made. Huawei now employs over 400 full-time IP professionals to implement its IP strategies. Huawei offers lessons for other companies from emerging economies who want to compete successfully on the world market.