The question of who owns a company is often open to interpretation. For example, which of the following is correct?

* Mark Zuckerberg owns ~25% of Facebook, because he owns ~25% of the outstanding shares.

* Mark Zuckerberg owns ~50% of Facebook, because he has a lot of special shares that end up giving him ~50% of the shareholder votes.

* Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook in totality, because he runs the company and there’s no mechanism for anyone to force him out.

In this particular case, the authors and Huawei seem to agree about what’s on paper. The authors just don’t think that the structure Huawei calls “worker ownership” allows workers to actually decide what the company will do.