In Dallas, China's NQ Mobile Opens a Second Global Headquarters

Set in a quiet neighborhood a few miles from downtown Dallas, NQ Mobile’s office is indistinguishable from that of any American tech company. Situated amid low-rise buildings, stylish restaurants, and a bike trail, the smartphone-security specialist’s workplace features a game room, big-screen TVs tuned to ESPN, and porches with deck furniture for alfresco meetings. There’s little to suggest that NQ Mobile is a foreign enterprise—it’s Chinese—or that it’s home to one of oddest corporate structures in techdom.

The company has two global headquarters, in Dallas and Beijing, and two chief executive officers: co-founder Henry Lin in China and former Samsung Electronics Chief Strategy Officer Omar Khan, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who moved to the U.S. from Pakistan at 10 months old. While most of the antivirus and anti-malware company’s 400 employees work in Beijing and about 60 percent of its revenue comes from China, the Dallas office has only three Mandarin speakers. “We didn’t want to be a subsidiary,” says international marketing chief Conrad Edwards, another Samsung veteran. Khan’s team manages software developers and user-experience engineers in Beijing, where the company pays salaries that are one-quarter of what it would pay in the U.S., Khan says.