A $ 100 billion technology is looking at current chaos caused by President Trump’s tariffs with a calm, detached view. Huawei.
The company was blocked from the US market in 2019 in the first period of the current president and has had to adapt and lose in its largest market outside the Chinese mainland.
The executive order prevented Huawei from working with US companies, both in B2C and in B2B, forcing large US networks to spend hundreds of millions of dollars replacing network sets from the Chinese company.
The EO was not removed by the next current US president, Joe Biden, which effectively made it permanent.
Frop until 2025 and Huawei is in good shape. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, the proverbs say, and Huawei has had to adapt quickly or risk becoming a footnote and must literally fight for his survival.
It acted quickly and resolutely. In 2020, it sold its smartphone device, honor, to a Chinese consortium and has invested massively in research and development (F&U).
It is extremely ironic that its latest annual report issued on March 31, 2025, just days before the current market tour, shows that Huawei revenue is almost back to their top by 2020.
Yes, the net profit fell 28%, but that was because the company doubles F&U, a sector that it dedicated more than 20% of its revenue, or nearly $ 25 billion. In total since 2014, it has spent more than $ 170 billion on R&D.
“What doesn’t kill you stronger”
From December 2023, Huawei had more than 140,000 active patents and had filed more than 3,000 patents in the United States in 2024, a 44% growth compared to the previous year, a larger number and a faster growth speed than Apple, IBM or Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Huawei focused on developing his homework ecosystem like Microsoft, Google and Apple. Its Ascend Compute platform and Harmonyos operating systems are now spent on hundreds of millions of units in China and most importantly all over the world.
It has succeeded where even the mighty Microsoft failed, with one-handed creation and maintenance of a third operating system outside the current US-centric duopoly of iOS and Android.
Its Kunpeng -Server CPU series and rises AI chips gradually reduces the US Hegemony on computer hardware in the Chinese mainland.
And that is, despite the role of Hisilicon, another of its subsidiaries, plays in push to develop RISC-V as an alternative to both the X86 and Arm (a trait that is not without controversy).
Given the current speculation that US President Trump can impose additional tariffs on China, which essentially makes it even more difficult to do business with the world’s second largest market, Chinese companies may consider removing the US market from their business plans.
Using Huawei’s experience as a Playbook would not be a bad place to start for the one who will take the dangerous path.
A common saying in China is If you endure the bitterest of bitterness you will first become a person over others (Thanks Google Gemini).
Sometimes short -term pain, no matter how harsh they are, is the only viable gate of prolonged winnings.
