Huawei Will Survive U.S.-China Trade Wars

After decades of growth, U.S. sanctions dealt a serious blow to China’s private telecom giant. The company will nevertheless survive on the strength of China’s domestic market.

Huawei logo on the facade of a facility in Canada in 2018. Source.

The Chinese corporation Huawei has been the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker since 2012, when it overtook Sweden’s Ericsson.¹ Its revenue rose from $35.5 billion in 2013 to $136.7 billion in 2020, while its workforce increased to nearly 200,000.² Huawei is China’s largest corporate spender on research and development, spending $17 billion in 2020. This was more than the three major Chinese tech companies—Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—combined. Its R&D spending is bested only by Amazon and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Huawei is also one of the world’s largest privately held companies: it is legally wholly owned by a holding company, which is in turn 99% owned by a “trade union committee” and 1% owned by its 78-year-old founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei.³