AppId is over the quota
By Ashlee Vance and Bruce Einhorn
Matt Bross at home in Flint Hill, Mo. The house has a chapel replete with stained glass windows Mark Mahaney
Matt Bross lives in Flint Hill, Mo., a town of 460 people about an hour’s drive northwest of St. Louis. A long driveway leads over a babbling brook to his six-bedroom, seven-bathroom mansion situated on dozens of picturesque wooded acres. It then winds past a statue of Jesus, a 1923 Model T Ford, a horse-drawn carriage, and a flagpole worthy of the Pentagon. The backyard is a Norman Rockwell-meets-Donald Trump spectacle: A baseball diamond and Ferris wheel flank a Bellagio-inspired pool with water slides and dancing fountains. Inside, guests can hit up the bowling alley and Skee-Ball ramp or take in a show in the movie theater. The main room of note, however, is in the basement. It’s the strategic command and control center of Huawei, the giant Chinese communications equipment maker for whom Bross is chief technology officer.
The space looks like a typical office conference room, with its big wooden table in the middle and eight plush leather chairs. Against the back wall is a giant TV equipped with a Huawei videoconferencing system. During a visit to the office in June, Bross (rhymes with “floss”) plops his heavyset frame down at the table, picks up a touchscreen device, and demonstrates how he can video chat with various Huawei offices. He manages much of Huawei’s $2.5?billion R&D budget and tens of thousands of engineers. There’s a button for the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen, another for its U.S. home base in Plano, Tex., and still others for research and development facilities in Mexico, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Thailand, Chile, Sweden, and 13 other places. He runs through the design of a forthcoming networking switch with some engineers, then shifts to business talk with sales prospects. “You look like the prettiest date at the dance,” Bross tells a customer, pouring on the Midwestern charm.
When Huawei hired Bross two years ago, it stunned the technology industry. Bross has a long, decorated history in telecommunications, making him a natural choice for a hard-charging company. Still, Huawei had always run a secretive operation and picked its top managers from China. With Bross, Huawei was inviting a foreigner, Ozark drawl and all, into its upper ranks, putting him in charge of the company’s entire technology agenda and asking him to help win sales in North America. And Bross was granted the freedom to do all this from his basement, thousands of miles from the home office in Shenzhen.
Bross is part of Huawei’s effort to become a modern multinational company in the vein of an IBM or a Siemens that can send managers around the world, hire top talent in places such as the U.S., Europe, and India—and do all that without giving people the creeps. Huawei was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former technician in the People’s Liberation Army who had 21,000 yuan (about $2,500) in his pocket and a dream of selling telecommunications equipment. Ren moved from reselling other companies’ gear to making his own, and Huawei flourished selling routers and switches, the core components of phone and Internet networks, in rural China. Then it expanded into Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, using low, low prices to undercut Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola, and Cisco Systems. In 2003, Huawei nearly bought Motorola’s network infrastructure business, says Huawei Deputy Chairman Xu Zhijun, but the deal died after a Motorola management shakeup.
More recently, Huawei has moved beyond cheap copycat gear toward more sophisticated networking equipment. The products have been good enough to win 45 of the world’s 50 largest communications providers as customers. Now Huawei is in the process of expanding beyond its traditional customer base of telecommunications companies to offer networking products and cloud computing services to businesses, as well as smartphones and tablet computers to consumers. Last year the company posted revenue of $28?billion, up from $1.9?billion in 2000, making it the largest technology vendor in China. It employs 110,000 people scattered all over the globe.
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