Biography | 任正非 Ren Zhengfei — The Nanyou Residential Block Where Huawei Was Registered

Huawei's own campus history says the firm started in 1987 in a small apartment in Nanshan District, Shenzhen. Chinese company histories place that first office in a residential building inside Nanyou New Village, the housing estate of the Shenzhen South Sea Oil group Ren Zhengfei had just left. Shenzhen Huawei Technology Co., Ltd. was registered on 15 September 1987 with partners and a stated capital of 21,000 yuan. The two-character name is conventionally glossed as a pledge to work for China and to get something done. He became president in 1988 and has kept the chief-executive title since. The first work was not invention. The new firm resold private-branch telephone switches brought in from Hong Kong, then began assembling small exchanges from imported parts. The apartment itself is not a pin. Nanyou is still a mixed neighbourhood around Nanhai Boulevard and Dengliang Road. The metro station now called Nanyou sits at that crossroads. This memory is pinned at neighbourhood scale on purpose. The 1987 flat was ordinary private housing then, and the streets around it still are. Photo: Etienne Ansotte, European Commission, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Ren Zhengfei in Brussels, 2010.