Recently, the United States has seriously taken on some influential Chinese companies, especially Huawei, not only restricting the latter's access to its market, but also forcing allies not to buy equipment from a Chinese manufacturer. There are constant allegations of Huawei's close ties to the Chinese government. And a recently published research paper that analyzes Huawei's ownership structure aims to refute the company's claim that it is owned by employees. It is reported that the identity of the actual owners is unknown, and they may well be considered the Chinese government.
Authors speakers were Donald Clarke of George Washington University and Christopher Balding of Fulbright University in Vietnam. It states that Huawei is wholly owned by a holding company, 99% of which is owned by the trade union committee. If the organization is a typical Chinese trade union committee, this, the authors say, could mean that the telecommunications giant is owned and controlled by the government.
According to a report published on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), trade union leaders in China are not elected or accountable to workers. On the contrary, they owe their loyalty to the higher trade union organizations, up to and including the All China Federation of Trade Unions, which is controlled by the Communist Party and whose head is in the Politburo, the highest political body of China's ruling party.
“Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership interest of the trade union committee is real, and if the Huawei union and its committee function as ordinary Chinese unions, the company can be considered essentially state-owned,” the document says.
The report says that Huawei's claims about employee ownership are not true because the company's employees, under Chinese law, do not control union decisions. Allegedly, employees own "virtual shares" that do not give voting rights and allow them to participate only in a profit-sharing scheme, and this right is lost when a person leaves the company.
Huawei said in a statement to the TechNode resource request that the document is based on unreliable sources and assumptions made without understanding the full body of facts. The company added that its union fulfills the duties and exercises the rights of shareholders through a commission of representatives, which acts as Huawei's highest decision-making body. At the same time, the members of the commission of representatives are elected by the shareholders having the right to vote. “They do not report to any government agency or political party, and they are under no obligation to do so,” the company said.
In his Against the background of problems with the United States, Huawei said that it is a company wholly owned by its employees - this statement became the mainstay of the defense against recent allegations by the US government about the potential influence of Chinese authorities on the company. Huawei's ownership structure was created as an employee shareholding scheme, and it now has 96 shareholders. The company clarified in the report that no government agency or outside organization owns Huawei shares.
Ownership has become a sensitive topic for the telecommunications giant after the US government banned shipments of Huawei equipment on the grounds that the latter could be used by the Chinese government for espionage.
Source: 3dnews.ru