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Huawei's fight to fix its image and conquer the smartphone world
"Man, China gets all the good phones." This is the kind of comment we've been hearing a lot lately. But, very few of those Chinese smartphones make it to Western markets. Besides, some folks remain skeptical of Chinese smartphones -- either due to bad experience in the past or because of fears over spying by the Chinese government. Huawei in particular has taken quite a bit of heat, with the spotlight set on its founder, Ren Zhengfei, who served in the People's Liberation Army until 1983. Yet Ren has explained -- more than once -- that he was just an Engineering Corps officer who helped set up a synthetic fiber factory to tackle the country's clothing shortage, and his team was disbanded soon after completion. But that hasn't satisfied everyone and, as the world's third-largest smartphone maker plus one of the largest telecom equipment vendors, Huawei needs to prove its critics wrong.