AGENDA SETTERS - WHO ARE THE DRIVING FORCES IN THE TECH INDUSTRY?

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Agenda Setters 2005
TOP 50
Ren Zhengfei

No. 18 Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO, Huawei Technologies

Last year's position: Not placed

Chinese telecoms and networking giant Huawei Technologies is taking on established IT industry heavyweights such as Cisco but its founder and CEO prefers to keep a low profile.

Ren Zhengfei is a former officer of the People's Liberation Army. He founded Huawei in 1988, and in 17 years he has led the company from a switch distributor to a $5.6bn telecoms giant employing some 22,000 people. Huawei recently got a piece of BT's $20bn 21st century network project and has been linked with a possible takeover of Marconi.

Cisco sued the Chinese company for intellectual property infringement in 2003 in a case that was recently settled out of court. But far from being a Cisco copycat, the Agenda Setters panel agrees it is Huawei's vast investment in R&D that is causing Cisco some sleepless nights and setting it apart from the competition in defining where telecoms, networking and 3G technologies are heading in the future.

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THE LIST
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BUSINESS LEADERS
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ANALYSIS
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  3. Networks
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  5. IT Services
  6. Hardware
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  2. Public Sector
  3. Financial Services
  4. Retail & Leisure
Agenda Setters Past

Take a walk down memory lane - and find out who made the Agenda Setters poll over the years:

QUOTATION

"China clearly has many dimensions and many are setting an agenda. It's at the political level, it's at the investment level, it's at the contract manufacturing level and it's at the software level - it's all over."
--Peter Rowell, Regent Associates executive chairman and Agenda Setters panellist


AGENDA SETTERS .EXTRA

How to spend $4 billion? Google has plenty of ideas New York Times via International Herald Tribune

The resurrection of Steve Jobs The Economist

Developing the Skype ecosystem: Q&A with CEO Niklas Zennstrom DigiTimes.com

Ballmer: Microsoft 'not above learning from others' eWeek


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