Little is publicly known about the un-listed Huawei's internal operations, however, and Meng remained an obscure figure until 2011, when the company unveiled its top leadership for the first time with Meng listed as CFO. Huawei credits her for re-organising the company's financial and IT architecture beginning in the early 2000s, so that the company could cope with its rapid global growth. Rising star - But Meng's career soon took off and she rose to top financial positions.
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In interviews, she has referred to him as "President Ren", rather than "father". "He is a CEO at work, and a father at home," Meng once said of Ren, to emphasise that competence, not connections, determined one's path at Huawei. This may have been aided by the fact that she took her mother's surname from a young age, for reasons that remain unclear. According to Chinese media, Meng kept her head down for years, to such an extent that few knew who her father was. But Meng, reported to be in her mid-40s, went on to earn a Chinese management degree and later joined Huawei's finance department. Meng has sought to stress her own "humble" beginnings, with Chinese media reporting that she once penned an internal memo claiming that her first tasks at the Shenzhen-based company involved secretarial work - answering phones and acting as a typist. Ren, 74, a former People's Liberation Army engineer, founded the company with a few thousand dollars in 1987, growing it into one of the world's leading suppliers of hardware for telecommunications networks. Its officials have taken pains to stress that the company is a meritocracy, but there seems little doubt that family ties aided Meng's rise. Huawei is the second-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world after Samsung Electronics, having overtaken Apple earlier this year, and is ranked 72nd on the Fortune Global 500 with revenues of nearly $90 billion in the most recent fiscal year. Doing so would make her one of the world's top female corporate bosses.
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The affair is a major setback for a woman who had been rising through the company founded by her father Ren Zhengfei, sparking speculation in recent years that she would some day assume full control. Her arrest follows a US probe into the company's alleged violations of sanctions against Iran.
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Meng, Huawei's chief financial officer, was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States, which seeks to extradite her in a move that could blow tensions between the two powers wide open.
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As the daughter of the company's founder, Meng Wanzhou was known internally as the "princess" of telecoms giant Huawei and possible heir to the throne, but now finds herself a pawn in the US-China trade clash.