Huawei’s 2025 revenue was 880.9 billion yuan, only 10.5 billion yuan less than the historical peak! Meng Wanzhou: We must restrain the boundaries of development

On the evening of March 31, Huawei quietly disclosed its 2025 financial report on its official website. Overall operating results were in line with expectations.

Specifically, in 2025, Huawei achieved global sales revenue of 880.9 billion yuan, up 2.2% year over year; net profit was 68.0 billion yuan, up 8.8%. Compared with historical performance, in 2025 Huawei’s revenue scale was only second to the 891.4 billion yuan recorded in 2020, ranking as the second-highest level in Huawei’s history.

However, compared with the more than 20% revenue growth rate in 2024, Huawei’s development pace in 2025 has clearly slowed. Behind this is Huawei’s deliberate move to narrow the front lines and focus its efforts on meeting the challenges of the AI era.

Huawei’s rotating Chair, Meng Wanzhou, said in her remarks that artificial intelligence may be the last technological transformation in human history—destined for ups and downs, and also necessarily for a grand, sweeping wave. We firmly believe this will be the biggest development opportunity in the next decade or even longer, as well as the most certain strategic opportunity. Over the past more than 30 years, our unremitting exploration and solid accumulation have been precisely to seize this major technological transformation in human history.

At the same time, she also said that the macro environment remains challenging and uncertainty continues to rise. When navigating through the fog, more important than the speed of progress is the precision of the compass. “While capturing certain opportunities, we must also maintain strategic focus. We need to keep strategic resolve, move forward steadily and with confidence, adhere to a hardware-centered profit model, rein in the boundaries of development, strengthen our core competitiveness, and build a ‘silicon-based black soil.’” Meng Wanzhou said.

HarmonyOS ecosystem crosses the line between life and death

Huawei’s ICT infrastructure business remains the ballast for the company. This business mainly includes building communication networks and providing hardware equipment and software services to global carriers. With the peak of 5G construction already past, major telecom operators are compressing capital expenditures. For example, China Mobile’s 2025 capital expenditure is only 150.9 billion yuan, down 8% year over year; it is expected to further fall to 136.6 billion yuan in 2026, down 9.5% year over year.

Even so, in 2025 Huawei’s ICT infrastructure business revenue still grew, reaching 375.01B yuan, up 2.6% year over year, and it remains the business unit with the largest share of revenue. Meng Wanzhou commented: “The connectivity industry has overcome the impact of the industry investment cycle.”

The terminal business that the public is most familiar with follows next. In 2025, full-year sales revenue reached 344.47B yuan, up 1.6% year over year, with the revenue scale close to that of the ICT infrastructure business.

Due to restrictions from U.S. sanctions, the core market for Huawei phones remains China. But in recent years, China’s smartphone market has remained sluggish, which will inevitably affect the terminal business. According to IDC data, in 2025, China’s smartphone market shipped about 284 million units for the full year, down 0.6% year over year. Among them, Huawei ranked first domestically with a market share of 16.4%, down 1.9% year over year.

However, as the supply chain continues to improve and production capacity steadily increases, Huawei’s market coverage and supply capability across multiple price tiers have been restored. On March 23, Huawei released its Yuan-level model Enjoy 90 series. The entire lineup is equipped with the Kirin 8-series chip, which means that Kirin chip production capacity can support larger-scale shipments of entry-level products. Today, from the Mate, Pura, and nova series to the entry-level Enjoy series, Huawei has completed a full return of products across all price tiers.

In the key HarmonyOS ecosystem, Huawei disclosed that by the end of 2025, there were 36 million terminal devices running HarmonyOS 5 and HarmonyOS 6, more than 10 million HarmonyOS developers, and more than 350k apps and services available to users through the app market.

△Image source: Huawei official website

“The start and end points of an ecosystem are developers. Only when developers and partners succeed first can Huawei gain the opportunity to survive and develop in a thriving ecosystem. By the end of 2025, the HarmonyOS ecosystem has crossed the line between life and death.” Meng Wanzhou said.

In addition to phones, another important segment of Huawei’s terminal business is the Huawei AITO smart cars (Huawei Smart Selection). It is understood that under the Hongmeng Zhixing brand, there are brands such as AITO, Zhijie, Xiangjie, Zunjie, and Shangjie, etc. In 2025, new cars delivered totaled 589k units, up 32% year over year.

ICT and the terminal two core industries contribute about 82% of Huawei’s revenue. At the same time, Huawei’s other emerging businesses are also growing steadily. Among them, digital energy business revenue reached 350k yuan, up 12.7%; intelligent vehicle solutions business revenue was 589k yuan, up 72.1%, becoming the fastest-growing segment among all business lines.

Only Huawei Cloud’s performance was relatively weak. In 2025, it achieved sales revenue of 77.31B yuan, down 3.5% year over year. Some analysts believe that on one hand, internet cloud vendors are actively doubling down on large models and AI applications, using low prices to seize market share, which further intensifies industry competition; on the other hand, Huawei internally insists on high-quality development and proactively reduces businesses with low gross margins and long receivable periods.

Huawei said that as of the end of December 2025, Huawei Cloud had covered 34 geographic regions and 101 availability zones worldwide, serving customers in more than 170 countries and regions. Among them, in the China market, 95% of China’s TOP30 automakers and over 90% of China’s TOP50 internet companies, etc., have chosen Huawei Cloud.

Overall, Meng Wanzhou pointed out that in 2025 Huawei’s connectivity industry overcame the impact of the industry investment cycle; the computing industry seized the development opportunities brought by artificial intelligence; the terminal business pressed through challenges, and the HarmonyOS ecosystem crossed the experience threshold; the digital energy business insisted on prioritizing quality; Huawei Cloud focused on building competitiveness by concentrating on core businesses; and the intelligent vehicle solutions business achieved rapid development.

“At this moment, we are drawing in our fists—so that we can launch a stronger strike in the future.”

Huawei’s slower development pace is not a passive move, but the result of an active strategic adjustment.

Against the backdrop of the rapid advancement of the AI wave, companies are easily tempted by an “expansion impulse with multiple points of attack,” trying to build their own “closed-loop ecosystem.” But Huawei chose differently, making it clear that it would achieve strategic focus and concentrate resources on areas that can form long-term competitive barriers.

Taking the most closely watched smartphone business as an example, Huawei did not pursue extreme breakthroughs in revenue scale and profit. Instead, in the context of gradually recovering chip supply, it stabilized product pricing and continued to expand the user base of the HarmonyOS ecosystem through a more cost-effective pricing strategy.

In its financial report, Meng Wanzhou sent a clear signal: “We need to be bold in strategically letting go and grow together with the vanguard of the times. Doing subtraction well is to better do multiplication. At this moment, drawing in our fists is so that we can launch a stronger strike in the future.”

Specifically, in the connectivity industry, Huawei has, in recent years, initiated internally the “Tianshui Plan,” the “Dishui Plan,” and the “Pacific Plan.” These three plans are designed to explore new traffic growth points and market space.

Among them, the “Tianshui Plan” mainly focuses on building an intelligent connectivity ecosystem, creating more “traffic entry points” in wireless fields such as 5G and 5G-A; the “Dishui Plan” focuses on three key fixed-line core scenarios: data centers, smart parks, and digital homes; and the “Pacific Plan,” centered on computing power, integrates computing, storage, and network resources, and enables collaborative innovation through “compute-network-storage” synergy, empowering customers in the computing and storage fields.

In the computing industry, Huawei has clearly proposed building a scale computing-power advantage around “clusters + supernodes.” In fact, Huawei no longer relies on the extreme performance breakthrough of a single chip. Instead, through a systems-engineering approach, it efficiently interconnects tens of thousands of chips to form a logically unified supercomputer, thereby achieving a leap forward in overall computing power. In addition, Huawei will open motherboards and modules to empower partners, accelerating the productization of “enterprise-edge low computing power” series and pushing Kunpeng and Ascend computing power to be everywhere.

At the terminal level, “AI entering the device” is becoming a core direction of the new round of technological transformation. Huawei uses its HarmonyOS operating system and the Xiaoyi intelligent agent as key tools to promote the systematized embedding of AI capabilities into the terminal ecosystem. It is reported that under the Harmony intelligent agent framework, the first batch of more than 80 Harmony app intelligent agents has officially launched.

△Image source: Fig. Worm (Tuchong)

In research and development investment, Huawei has not reduced spending due to slower revenue growth. In 2025, Huawei’s R&D spending reached 192.3 billion yuan, about 21.8% of full-year revenue, setting a historical record high. Cumulative R&D expenses over the past decade exceeded 1,382.0 billion yuan. By the end of 2025, Huawei’s R&D employees were about 114k, accounting for 53.7% of the company’s total employees.

“We are firmly moving toward an uncertain tomorrow. We will maintain strategic resolve, adhere to strategic focus, accelerate the transformation from strategy to the battlefield, deepen the developer ecosystem, and follow a path of high-quality development,” Meng Wanzhou said.

In addition, regarding personnel arrangements, Huawei released an announcement stating that, according to the company’s rotating chair system, from April 1 to September 30, 2026, Wang Tao will serve as the rotating Chair. This is also the first time Wang Tao has been appointed to this position. According to information on Huawei’s official website, Huawei currently has three rotating Chairs: Xu Zhijun, Meng Wanzhou, and Wang Tao.

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