Huawei

Ren Zhengfei, a former PLA engineer, founded Huawei in Shenzhen with 21,000 yuan (~$2,800). The company initially operated as a sales agent for imported PBX (Private Branch Exchange) telephone switching systems.

Huawei developed the C&C 08 digital telephone switchboard, a landmark achievement that enabled the company to compete in China's rural telecom market. The product generated billions in revenue and established Huawei as a telecom equipment maker.

Huawei won its first international contract in 1997, providing fixed-line network equipment to Hutchison Whampoa in Hong Kong. Later that year, Huawei launched its wireless GSM-based products, beginning the company's expansion into mobile network infrastructure. These milestones marked Huawei's initial steps from a Chinese domestic player toward becoming a global telecommunications equipment vendor.

Huawei signed a global framework agreement with Vodafone and became the first Chinese telecom equipment supplier granted Approved Supplier status. Its foreign contract orders surpassed domestic sales for the first time, marking its global arrival.

Huawei surpassed Ericsson to become the world's largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer by revenue, a position it has held continuously since, supplying equipment to over 170 countries and regions.

Huawei launched the Ascend P1, its first flagship smartphone, establishing the Consumer Business Group as a major revenue driver. By 2019, Huawei became the world's second-largest smartphone manufacturer behind Samsung, shipping over 240 million phones annually.

The US Commerce Department placed Huawei on the Entity List, severely restricting its access to American technology including Google's Android services and critical semiconductor supplies. The sanctions significantly impacted Huawei's smartphone business globally.

Huawei unveiled HarmonyOS, its in-house operating system designed to replace Android on its devices after US sanctions cut access to Google Mobile Services. The OS expanded to phones, IoT, and tablets, reaching hundreds of millions of devices.

Huawei overtook Samsung to become the world's largest smartphone manufacturer by market share in Q2 2020, shipping over 55 million devices globally. The achievement came despite escalating US sanctions that restricted Huawei's access to Google services and American chip technology. The milestone marked the peak of Huawei's consumer smartphone business before US sanctions severely impacted its handset division.

Huawei launched the Mate 60 Pro featuring a domestically-produced 7nm Kirin 9000s chip, surprising the industry and signaling China's progress in advanced semiconductor manufacturing despite US export controls. The phone marked Huawei's comeback in the premium smartphone market.

Huawei launched HarmonyOS NEXT (version 5.0), its first operating system built completely independent of Android architecture, with its own kernel, native app ecosystem, and no Android compatibility. The launch marked the culmination of Huaweis 5-year effort to break free from US technology restrictions following the 2019 Entity List sanctions, establishing China's first fully self-developed mobile operating system.

Huawei unveiled HarmonyOS 7 at its annual developer conference, restructuring the operating system around an agentic AI runtime that coordinates over 2,000 third-party AI agents through a single system-level Xiaoyi assistant. The update marked a fundamental shift from app-centric to intent-driven interaction, with 15% performance improvement over HarmonyOS 6. HarmonyOS had captured 19% of China's smartphone OS market in Q1 2026, surpassing Apple iOS at 16%. The stable release was scheduled for fall 2026 alongside the Mate 90 series.

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek placed an order for at least 160,000 of Huawei's next-generation Ascend 950DT accelerators, worth roughly USD 2.56 billion, for a gigawatt-scale data center in Inner Mongolia. The order represents one of the largest known deployments of Chinese-made AI silicon and a major commercial validation of Huawei's Ascend line under US export controls. Notably, DeepSeek reportedly does not plan to use the chips for training, the workload the Ascend 950DT was built to handle, underscoring persistent software and ecosystem gaps in Huawei's stack.