Huawei
More info
- Creator
- Ren Zhengfei
- Released
- 1987
- Type
- Telecom and electronics company
The Shenzhen telecom vendor that became the world's largest, and then a foreign-policy file.
Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army engineer, as a reseller of telephone switches. Through the 2000s Huawei built mobile networks for half the planet at prices Ericsson and Nokia couldn't touch, overtaking Ericsson as the largest telecom equipment maker around 2012. Its phones, running in-house Kirin chips from subsidiary HiSilicon, spent a while as the world's number two behind Samsung.
In 2019 the company landed on the US Entity List. That cost it Google services on Android, and in 2020 access to TSMC. The response was HarmonyOS, and in 2023 the Mate 60 Pro with a 7-nanometre chip from China's SMIC — something the sanctions were supposed to make impossible. Several European countries, Sweden among them, have shut Huawei out of their 5G networks.