Meng Wanzhou, Huawei CFO and Founder’s Daughter, Has Been Face of Secretive Company

By Dan Strumpf and Natasha Khan

The Huawei chief financial officer arrested in Canada at the behest of American authorities isn’t an ordinary senior executive.

Meng Wanzhou, 46 years old, is the daughter of the Chinese telecommunications giant’s founder and recently emerged as his potential successor.

Ms. Meng’s high profile raises the stakes not only for her company, but also for the U.S. and China, which are embarking on a fresh effort to resolve tensions around trade and technology. China’s embassy to Canada has already complained bitterly about the arrest and other Chinese tech companies have been punished this year for sanctions violations and allegedly stealing chip-design secrets.

The detention of Ms. Meng also deals a personal blow to her father, Ren Zhengfei, a 74-year-old former military engineer who founded Huawei more than three decades ago. He built Huawei into one of China’s largest and most global private business empires.

Washington has lately been stepping up efforts to curb Huawei’s global dominance in telecom-networking equipment due to concerns that its systems could be used for spying by Beijing. Huawei has long rejected the American claims, saying its systems are as secure as those of its Western rivals.

Huawei said it isn’t aware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng, who was arrested as part of an investigation into whether Huawei violated sanctions on sales to Iran. It said it complies with laws and regulations everywhere it operates.

This year, Ms. Meng was tapped to serve in one of Huawei’s deputy chairman positions-putting her just under her father in the company hierarchy-on a similar footing to three rotating chairmen who have long been seen as vying to succeed Mr. Ren.

The elevation was widely seen within Huawei as putting her in position to one day run one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, people familiar with the matter said. Still, a succession plan at the company has never been clearly laid out, the people said.

Ms. Meng’s rapid ascent within Huawei, and the fact that she is the founder’s daughter, have long drawn attention from both within and outside the company. At Ms. Meng’s high-profile public debut in early 2013, presenting performance estimates of the company at a media briefing, the then newly appointed CFO explained how her relationship with her father went from warm to businesslike as Huawei grew.

“He used to be a kind father, and my mother was the strict one,” she said in an interview with Chinese media. “But after starting Huawei, perhaps because running a company comes with high demands on his personality, he has now become a strict father.”

At the event, Ms. Meng also said that she herself made the decision to change her surname from Ren to Meng, her mother’s last name, at the age of 16. She was also previously known as Cathy.

Ms. Meng’s relationship with her father has long had a business tinge. According to an official history of the company published in 2017, it was Ms. Meng’s unhappiness with her father’s role as a Chinese Army engineer that led him to transfer to Shenzhen, where he eventually founded Huawei in 1983 with 20,000 yuan.

If not for that, Mr. Ren might have “stayed in the mountains in Sichuan and become a scientist,” the book said.

Yet Ms. Meng’s swift elevation within Huawei came as a surprise to some within the company. As recently as 2013, Mr. Ren spelled out in a memo to employees that his successor wouldn’t come from within his own family.
At a 2016 speech at Tsinghua University, Ms. Meng said that at Huawei, promotion is based on contribution and capability. “It’s not a competition who your father and mother are,” she said.

Huawei’s current leadership structure, in which a team of three executives take turns at the helm of the company in six-month stints, has long given rise to questions about who might succeed Mr. Ren, and has been a source of fascination among analysts who follow the company. During her 25-year ascent, Ms. Meng, a Chinese citizen who uses the name Meng Wanzhou, has worked across different divisions during her rise and led a partnership with International Business Machines Corp.

She is the company’s face to the financial world. Although Huawei is privately owned, it reports some annual results that she presents to investors. She is also the host of Huawei’s annual financial conference, called the Huawei ICT Finance Forum, a private event that has been held in New York, Cancún and Milan for Huawei’s investment bankers, analysts and other members of the financial community. The event has drawn luminaries such as former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as speakers.

Within Huawei, which is known for having a tough, hard-driving and team-oriented culture, Ms. Meng is known for her tough but quiet persona, according to people familiar with the matter. She also gained a reputation for cost cutting and reform.

Ms. Meng led a team of 1,500 accounting experts, including Chinese Ivy League graduates, and brought on an expert hired from GlaxoSmithKline to help reform Huawei’s tax regime, according to a new-year address to the company in 2017. In the same address, Ms. Meng applauded the hard work her team did to save cost for Huawei while reciting ancient and modern Chinese poems.

Yet in contrast to Huawei’s more public-facing executives, like Eric Xu, also a deputy chairman, she doesn’t give speeches at the company’s highest-profile yearly event, Huawei Connect, where the firm rents out giant exposition halls, typically in Shanghai, and shows off its range of technologies to customers and the media.

In 2007, Ms. Meng served as a board secretary for a Huawei holding company that owned Skycom Tech, a Hong Kong-based firm with business in Iran and employees who said they worked for “Huawei-Skycom,” according to a person familiar with the matter. She became a director at Skycom Tech in February 2008, Hong Kong corporate records show, before resigning in April of the following year.

That role is now the under scrutiny by American authorities.
Ms. Meng is one of two of Mr. Ren’s children in high-profile roles at Huawei. The other is Ren Ping, the head of a Huawei-owned company called Smartcom, which provides in-house travel services for employees and manages the company’s cafes and catering services at its Shenzhen headquarters.