A $ 100 billion technology company is probably analyzing the current chaos caused by President Trump’s tariffs with a serene and separate opinion. Huawei
The company was blocked from the US market in 2019, during the first period of the current president, and has had to adjust, losing its largest market out of continental China.
The Executive Order prevented Huawei from working with US companies, both in B2C and B2B, which forced the main US networks to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in replacing the Chinese company networks kit.
The EO was not eliminated by the next president of the United States, Joe Biden, which makes it effectively permanent.
Fast progress until 2025, and Huawei is in good shape. The need is the mother of all inventions, according to the saying, and Huawei has had to adapt rapidly or risk becoming a footnote, having to literally fight for their survival.
He acted quickly and decisively. In 2020, he sold his smartphone unit, Honor, to a Chinese consortium and has greatly invested in research and development (R&D).
It is extremely ironic that its latest annual report, issued on March 31, 2025, a few days before the current market agitation, show that Huawei’s revenues have almost returned to its 2020 peak.
Yes, the net gain fell 28%, but that was because the company is doubling in R&D, a sector to which it dedicated more than 20% of its income, or almost $ 25 billion. In total, since 2014, it has spent more than $ 170 billion on R&D D.
“What does not kill you makes you stronger”
As of December 2023, Huawei had more than 140,000 active patents and had presented more than 3,000 patents in the USA. In 2024, a growth of 44% compared to the previous year, a larger number and a faster growth rate than Apple, IBM or Alphabet, the parent company.
Huawei focused on developing his own harvest ecosystem, such as Microsoft, Google and Apple. Its Asce Compute platform and Harmonyos operating systems are now used in hundreds of millions of devices in China and, most importantly, worldwide.
He has succeeded where even the powerful Microsoft failed, creating and maintaining a third operating system outside the current duopoly focused on the United States and Android.
Its Kunpeng Server CPU range and Ascend Ai Chips are gradually decreasing the hegemony of the United States in computer hardware in continental China.
And despite the fact that Hysilicon paper, another of its subsidiaries, is playing in the impulse to develop RISC-V as an alternative to both X86 and ARM (a movement that is not exempt from controversy).
Given the current speculation that the president of the United States, Trump, can impose additional tariffs on China, which essentially, which makes it even more difficult to do business with the second largest market in the world, Chinese companies can contemplate eliminating the US market of their business plans.
Using Huawei’s experience as a play book would not be a bad place to start whoever wants to take that dangerous path.
A common proverb in China is If you support the most bitter bitterness, only then you will become a person above others (Thanks Google Gemini).
Sometimes, short -term pain, however hard they are, is the only viable entrance door for long -term gains.
