Huawei

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.