Before the high-profile US-China trade war, most senior executives at Huawei Technologies typically kept a low profile, even though the Chinese tech giant has become the world’s biggest telecoms network gear maker and beaten Apple to become the second-largest smartphone brand globally behind Samsung Electronics. Mobile chief Richard Yu Chengdong is the exception. Dubbed “Big Mouth Yu” by Chinese netizens because of his tendency to speak out, Yu has always been vocal about Huawei’s ambition to become top of the smartphone heap, even when the Chinese company was a minnow in a big pond. Born in 1969, Yu earned a master’s degree from China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, before joining Huawei in 1993. Huawei declined to comment for this article. Yu has been its 3G product director, vice-president of wireless networks, president of the wireless network product line, president of Europe, chief strategy and marketing officer, before chairing the company’s device business, according to information on Huawei’s official website. He is currently CEO of the consumer business group. which includes smartphones, laptops and other 5G-enabled devices, and has served as one of three rotating chairman at the company. Huawei scraps launch of new laptop as US blacklist bites Within Huawei circles, Yu is often feted with putting the company on track to conquer Europe back in 2004. Telfort, the smallest of four cellular communications providers in the Netherlands, wanted to roll out a 3G network but was daunted by the high barriers to entry, mainly prices and real estate to house base stations. It entered talks with Huawei, then a tiny operation in Europe with only a handful of employees. Huawei, which was desperate to break into the European market, sprang into action. Yu, who was vice-president of wireless networks then, cancelled all of his appointments and worked with Huawei’s small team in Europe and engineers back in China to devise a solution. Within a week, they came up with one – a base station that could be deployed in two parts, required little space to install and was cheap to run. Telfort was impressed. Within months the deal for a 10-year contract worth 230 million euros was sealed and Huawei was on the map. The next year, it won contracts from BT Group, formerly British Telecom, and became a supplier to Vodafone Group, one of the world’s largest mobile carriers. Yu’s career success in Europe earned him a place on the company board, the small 17-person circle that has the final say on Huawei’s entire business, which topped US$100 billion in revenue last year. The Chinese company identified smartphones as the next growth engine in 2011 and Yu was assigned to lead the business, even though Huawei was a small player in the market, which was dominated by foreign brands. It was a time when Chinese smartphone brands were still considered copycats and cheap alternatives to bigger players such as Samsung, Nokia and Apple. Huawei, which had a market share of less than 5 per cent in China, saw most of its sales from local carriers selling cheap handsets to secure consumers on years-long contract plans. Yu decided to shake things up. After he took charge of Huawei’s consumer business, he stopped providing cheap customised handsets to carriers in China, upgraded smart devices to the mid-to-high end segment, and abandoned the ultra-low-end of the phone market which was unprofitable, according to a 2012 Weibo post from Yu. Inside Huawei’s secretive plans to build an operating system to rival Android Huawei also started to use self-made HiSilicon processors and Balong chips, opened some e-commerce platforms, dedicated itself to user interface (UI) design, and established a goal of making the world’s best hardware. Unlike Huawei’s other key business segments, including the carrier and enterprise businesses which focus on network construction and smart city development, Huawei’s smartphone unit targets individual consumers directly, which has helped propel Yu into a public figure due to his regular social media appearances. In early 2012, Yu said Huawei wanted to achieve dozens of millions of unit sales each year with a new batch of phones to stay in line with iPhone’s hundreds of millions of shipments. Yu also said that Huawei would launch a flagship mobile phone that would be much stronger than the iPhone 5 in early 2013, after the company had dedicated itself to making superior products. It was this barrage of posts that earned him the “big mouth” moniker. Fast forward seven years though to 2019 and Huawei has become the largest smartphone vendor in China and the second- largest in the world. It even vowed – before the US put it on a trade blacklist – to grab 50 per cent of the Chinese smartphone market by the end of this year and take the global sales crown from Samsung no later than 2020. Huawei reassesses goal to be world’s bestselling smartphone vendor The company’s consumer electronics sector, including cellphones, was its biggest source of revenue last year, taking up almost 50 per cent of its total revenue. But Yu’s off-the-cuff remarks have also brought him some trouble. In February 2018, Huawei distanced itself from Yu’s comments that rivals were using politics to keep it out of US and that certain governments thought that the company had “become too strong”. Security concerns were widely reported to have prompted US carrier AT&T to walk away from a smartphone distribution deal with Huawei ahead of the China firm’s launch of its flagship Mate 10 Pro handset at the CES trade show in Las Vegas in January 2018. Later it was reported that Verizon Communications also abandoned plans to distribute Huawei’s smartphones in the US. “It’s not right to blame the other party for not accepting us, we can only try harder, maintain our openness and transparency and wait until the other party is willing to communicate with us,” Chen Lifang, Huawei corporate senior vice-president and head of communications, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post at the time. Huawei did not authorise Yu to make comments about the US on behalf of the company, and does not agree with his views, Chen added. In March this year, Yu told a German publication that the company had developed its own operating systems (OS) for both smartphones and computers, which could be used on its devices in the event that current systems provided by US technology giants are no longer available. Huawei’s self-developed OS will be able to support a range of products and systems within its ecosystem, including smartphones, computers, tablets, TVs, automobiles and smart wear, and will also be compatible with all Android applications and existing web applications, Yu was quoted as saying in a Securities Times report published on May 21. “The Huawei OS is likely to hit the market as soon as this fall, and no later than spring next year,” Yu said in a WeChat group discussion. The screenshot of the conversation has been widely circulated on Chinese media, but Huawei has declined to verify the information with the media. Yu revealed the existence of an alternative OS at a time when the Chinese company is caught in the middle of an escalating trade war between the US and China and as it faces a string of US charges, including that it stole trade secrets, violated economic sanctions and concealed its Iran business dealings via an unofficial subsidiary. Google and Microsoft, whose Android and Windows are used on Huawei’s laptops and tablets, have both suspended access for new Huawei devices with only a 90-day reprieve from the US government, in the wake of it being put on the trade blacklist. Huawei has now rowed back some of Yu’s optimism. “Huawei is reassessing its target to become the world’s top-selling smartphone vendor by 2020, after a US trade ban raised serious questions about its access to services that are crucial for international sales,” Zhao Ming, president of Honor, one of Huawei’s two smartphone brands, said recently. Meanwhile Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that assembles handset products for many phone brands including Apple and Xiaomi, has stopped several production lines for Huawei phones in recent days after the Shenzhen company reduced orders for new phones, the Post reported on June 1, citing people familiar with the matter. Even Yu has had to announce a partial retreat. He told CNBC this week that Huawei has scrapped the launch of a new laptop as a result of being barred from importing components from US suppliers. Yu said the planned launch of a new Matebook product had been put on hold indefinitely. Local Chinese media later reported that Huawei will release a new laptop product in July with a new configuration to the Mate series, citing company sources. Only time will tell if the ever-ebullient Yu will be able to maintain his optimism about Huawei in the months ahead amid the swirling tech storm. One thing is certain though, he now faces his biggest challenge - taking on Apple and Samsung without Android.