Huawei

Huawei is a maker of telecom network equipment and smartphones, founded in Shenzhen, China, in 1987. Its corporate fact sheet (updated April 2026) gives its head office as Shenzhen, puts its workforce at about 213,000 and says it operates in more than 170 countries and regions. Liang Hua is Chairman, and Huawei's release of its 2025 annual report names Sabrina Meng as Rotating Chairwoman. Its businesses span network equipment for carriers, IT products for enterprises, cloud, digital power, intelligent vehicle solutions and smart devices for consumers.

How it is owned, in Huawei's account

Huawei is not listed. It describes its ownership as follows; every line here is Huawei's own claim.

Revenue over time

Although unlisted, Huawei publishes an annual report each year with financial statements audited by KPMG. The years checked for this page:

Revenue fell 28.6% from 2020 to 2021 (calculated from the two years' figures). Huawei's 2021 release gave no reason for the decline; Sabrina Meng said that despite it, the company's ability to make a profit and generate cash flows was increasing. By 2025 revenue was almost back to the 2020 level. Huawei says it spent CNY192.3 billion on R&D in 2025, 21.8% of revenue, and CNY1.382 trillion over the past ten years.

What governments did

The measures against Huawei differ by country in both legal basis and scope. The main ones, listed by the government that took them:

Canada's statement describes its measures as intended actions subject to consultation. Each measure is the judgement of the government that took it; Huawei's own response is not part of this table.

What came after the sanctions

Huawei's moves since 2019 fall into what it let go and what it built for itself.

• Selling Honor (17 November 2020): The holding company announced the sale of all Honor business assets to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology. It cited the persistent unavailability of technical elements needed for its phone business, and said it would hold no shares in, and play no part in managing, the new Honor company.
• HarmonyOS (August 2019): Huawei's own operating system, unveiled at its developer conference in Dongguan. Techzine reported that the first version would appear on smart-screen products, and gave as background that Google had been forced to (temporarily) stop Huawei's Android license after the US government's action that May. In October 2024 Huawei released HarmonyOS NEXT, whose kernel, programming language and AI framework it says were developed without Android open-source code. Yicai Global reported more than 15,000 native apps and services, and HarmonyOS on more than one billion devices.
• Ascend (23 August 2019): Huawei launched the Ascend 910 AI processor and the MindSpore AI framework. The 256 TFLOPS at FP16 and 310 W maximum power are Huawei's figures. Its 2025 annual-report release says it will build industry ecosystems around Ascend, Kunpeng and HarmonyOS.
• Kirin 9000S (2023): The analysis firm TechInsights took apart the Mate 60 Pro smartphone and concluded from features of the die that its Kirin 9000S chip was made by SMIC and, from measured dimensions, that it has 7nm features. The findings were reported in September 2023. The earlier Kirin 980 had been made on TSMC's 7nm process (see iPhone XS and XR).

Huawei on this site

Huawei turns up repeatedly inside other companies' stories.

Before and after the sanctions alike, Huawei appears at almost every layer of the stack: network equipment, smartphone chips, operating systems and open-source foundations. So the measures against it did not target a single product either. They used a different tool at each layer: export controls (US Commerce), removal from networks (UK, Canada) and equipment authorization (FCC).