Profile: Huawei

Huawei has emerged as the leader for semiconductors  in China.  It designed the first domestically-produced 5G-capable smartphone chip, the Kirin 9000S and is invested in 97 companies through its Hubble Investment arm. In the global technology competition between China and the US, Huawei thus now plays a key role in two of the most critical technologies, mobile internet and semiconductors. With its solar inverters, forays into autonomous driving and its own AI framework, MindSpore, Huawei is now active across many of the technology areas the government has identified as critical.

The company is one of the most innovative companies by some metrics, and its focus on manufacturing and hardware over services and software is closely in line with the general focus of the Communist Party. It is thus likely to continue to play a very important role in critical technology development in China, and is turning into a manufacturing champion like Samsung, active across many technologies.

Known today for its highly disciplined, militaristic “wolf” culture – Huawei's close ties to the government facilitated its meteoric rise as a telecommunications champion in the 1990s and early 2000s, fueled by Chinese the government’s standardization and regulatory power during the 4G era. The company invested in indigenous innovation early, and its successes in 5G ultimately led to the US government taking notice and placing Huawei on the entity list in 2019 for violating Iran sanctions.

Huawei’s addition to the Entity List reinforced to China’s government the importance of self-sufficiency in key technologies, a lesson it had learned thirty years earlier when the US instituted embargos after the crackdown on protesters following the Tiananmen uprising.

The company, having demonstrated its ability to innovate with 5G, is now involved across the semiconductor supply chain, and is seen as responsible for key breakthroughs., including designing the  most advanced Chinese competitor to Nvidia GPUs, needed for Artificial Intelligence, today.