By Mr Ren Zhengfei's own admission, much of his job now is not running Huawei, the company he founded, but giving media interviews and speaking publicly, like what he was about to do last Wednesday afternoon.

The Chinese tech giant had flown its international business partners and a group of foreign and local journalists to its Shenzhen campus for the third instalment of A Coffee With Ren. It is a panel discussion series started in June, where experts chat with him over coffee, about tech matters and, naturally, Huawei's woes.