Apple vs Huawei

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, in the garage of Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California. Wozniak had designed the Apple I — a bare circuit board with no keyboard, case, or display — and Jobs saw the commercial potential. Wayne, who co-signed the founding documents, sold his 10% stake back for $800 just twelve days later. That stake would eventually be worth over $700 billion.

After a boardroom power struggle with CEO John Sculley — a man Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi with the now-famous line "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" — Jobs was stripped of his duties and left Apple in September 1985. He founded NeXT and later acquired Pixar for $10 million. Both decisions would prove transformative.

By 1997, Apple was burning through cash at a catastrophic rate and was reportedly 90 days from insolvency. In a move that stunned the industry, Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million — and brought Steve Jobs back. At Macworld that year, Bill Gates appeared on screen via satellite to announce Microsoft's $150 million investment in Apple. The crowd booed. But the cheque cleared.

On January 9, 2007, Jobs announced that Apple was reinventing the phone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed it: "There's no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share." He was wrong. The iPhone became the most profitable consumer product in history, generating over $1 trillion in cumulative revenue and establishing Apple as the defining technology company of the 21st century.

On August 2, 2018, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalisation. It then crossed $2 trillion in 2020, $3 trillion in 2022, and by mid-2026 had reached $4.36 trillion — a figure larger than the GDP of Germany. The Services segment, which includes the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Music, now generates over $100 billion annually and commands margins that rival the most profitable software companies on earth.

After years of criticism for lagging behind in AI, Apple launched Apple Intelligence across its device ecosystem in 2025 and 2026, partnering with Google to integrate Gemini directly into Siri. The strategy — on-device AI with a privacy-first model, rather than massive cloud infrastructure buildout — proved controversial but financially vindicated. Q1 fiscal 2026 revenue hit a record $143.8 billion, up 16% year-over-year, with iPhone sales surging 23%. Apple had shifted 25% of iPhone production to India to reduce geopolitical risk, and analysts at Wedbush were calling the upcoming iPhone 18 cycle a generational buying opportunity.

Ren Zhengfei was a former deputy director of the People's Liberation Army engineering corps when he founded Huawei in Shenzhen in 1987 with approximately 21,000 yuan (roughly $5,000) in registered capital — contributed equally by six founding investors including himself. China's economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping had established Shenzhen as a special economic zone where private enterprise was permitted, and Huawei began as a reseller of imported private branch exchange (PBX) telephone systems for hotels and businesses. The company's early years were a masterclass in competitive audacity: Ren sent salespeople to rural Chinese cities that foreign competitors ignored entirely, building a national distribution presence from the ground up.

Ren made the decision in the early 1990s that would define Huawei's trajectory: instead of remaining a reseller of other companies' technology, Huawei would develop its own. Engineers reverse-engineered PBX systems and produced Huawei's first original product — the C&C08 digital telephone switch — in 1993. The product rapidly became a bestseller in China, undercutting foreign competitors on price while matching their functionality. Huawei invested an extraordinary share of its revenue in R&D from the start — a discipline that made it a genuine technology company rather than a manufacturing partner. By 2000, Huawei had over 10,000 employees and was filing thousands of international patents.

In 2012, Huawei surpassed Ericsson to become the world's largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer — a title held for over a century by a Swedish company. Huawei's 5G research was widely acknowledged as the most advanced in the industry; it held more 5G patents than any other company. Simultaneously, the US government and its intelligence allies began raising serious concerns: Huawei's equipment, they argued, could contain hidden backdoors enabling Chinese state surveillance. The US House Intelligence Committee issued a report in 2012 recommending that US companies avoid Huawei. Huawei categorically and repeatedly denied any connection between its equipment and Chinese intelligence. The accusations were never proven to a legal evidentiary standard.

The US Department of Commerce added Huawei to its Entity List in May 2019, requiring US companies to obtain government licences before doing business with it. In 2020, the restrictions were tightened further: any company using US software, equipment, or design tools was blocked from supplying Huawei with advanced semiconductors. The effect was devastating: Huawei lost access to TSMC's manufacturing, to Google's Android licences, to Qualcomm's chips, and to hundreds of US technology components. Its consumer smartphone business — which had made it the world's second-largest phone maker by 2020 — collapsed. In 2018, Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou (Ren's daughter) was arrested in Canada at US request on charges of Iran sanctions violations; she was released in 2021 after nearly three years of house arrest.

Huawei reported revenue of approximately $118 billion for 2024 — its second-highest in company history, recovering from a trough of $99 billion in 2022. The company invested $25 billion (20%+ of revenue) in R&D. Huawei had developed HarmonyOS NEXT — a completely Android-independent mobile operating system — launched in October 2024 on the Mate 70 series. Its Ascend AI chips were being used by DeepSeek and other major Chinese AI companies as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs. Huawei had also entered the electric vehicle technology sector, providing autonomous driving systems to Chinese automakers. The company Ren Zhengfei had started as a phone reseller with $5,000 remained under existential US pressure — and was generating $118 billion in annual revenue anyway.