Companies in Shenzhen, Guangdong

Huawei was founded in 1987 in Shenzhen by Ren Zhengfei, a former army engineer who started as a sales agent for imported phone switches with 21,000 yuan of borrowed capital. The company poured its early profits into R&D, built its own switches, and then rode China's telecom boom to become the world's largest telecom equipment maker — before US sanctions in 2019 turned it into the global symbol of China's technology self-reliance drive. The business spans three pillars: ICT infrastructure (5G base stations, optical networks, and routers — where Huawei is the global leader), consumer devices (its Mate and P smartphones, which returned to the market with homegrown Kirin chips after US export controls), and cloud & digital power (Huawei Cloud, and its market-leading solar inverters and EV powertrain systems under the Huawei Inside brand). Its HarmonyOS operating system, built after Google's Android license was revoked, now runs on hundreds of millions of devices. With about 200,000 employees and annual revenue near RMB 700 billion (US$100 billion), Huawei spends over 20% of revenue on R&D every year — one of the highest rates of any large company. For the telecom industry, Huawei's equipment carries a large share of the world's mobile traffic; for geopolitics, it is the company at the center of the US-China technology contest.