5 Largest Employee Owned Companies in the World

2. Huawei

Total number of employees in 2019: 194,000

Huawei is a Chinese technology company, and a very controversial pick in our list, which I’ll get to later. Huawei is involved in the designing, development and sales of technology equipment, and is one of the biggest cell phone manufacturers in the world, providing mid range and high end phones to customers. It has a presence in over 170 countries and annual revenue in 2019 increased to over $121 billion. In fact, in July of this year, Huawei actually beat both Samsung and Apple to become the top smartphone company in the world, despite the sanctions it has had to face by Western countries and in light of Samsung’s sales dropping as the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world.

These sanctions have come about due to accusations of Huawei supporting the state and links to the People’s Liberation Army as well as concerns by Western powers, and especially the United States, that the telecom infrastructure developed by Huawei could allow the Chinese government to spy on these countries. In addition, Huawei has also been accused of helping the Chinese government in detaining and surveilling its Uyghur Muslim population, which has been the primary reason behind the aforementioned sanctions. This has all culminated in the CFO of the company being arrested in Canada, who is currently out on bail.

Even Huawei’s appearance on this list is controversial. While it alleges to be owned completely by employees, the shares are actually held by a trade committee and the governance procedures of this committee, its members, its leaders and the process of selection of these leaders is all hidden and not accessible to anyone outside of the committee, which purports to hold the shares on behalf of the employees. All this has led to the assertion that Huawei employees don’t actually own part of the company but rather get rewarded for the shares they hold when they leave the company, which then revert back to the company. Despite the controversy, we have included Huawei in our list and leave it to the readers to assess based on available facts and figures whether it is or not an employee owned company.

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