Huawei's 2025 revenue is 880.9 billion yuan, only 10.5 billion yuan less than the peak! Meng Wanzhou: We need to restrain the boundaries of development

Source: The Times Weekly; Author: Xie Silin

                      Image source: Times Weekly reporter photo            

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 880.9B yuan, up 2.2% year over year; net profit was 68B yuan, up 8.8%. Compared with its historical performance, in 2025 Huawei’s revenue scale was only second to the 891.4B yuan recorded in 2020, making it Huawei’s second-highest level in its history.

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

In her remarks, Huawei Rotating Chairwoman Meng Wanzhou pointed out that artificial intelligence may be the last technical transformation in human history—destined to be full of twists and turns, and also inevitably grand and far-reaching. “We firmly believe this will be the biggest development opportunity in the next ten years or even a longer period, and also the most certain strategic opportunity. Over the past more than 30 years, our relentless exploration and solid accumulation are precisely to seize this major technological transformation in human history.”

At the same time, she also said that the macro environment remains severe and uncertainty continues to grow. “When navigating through the fog, what matters more than speed is the precision of the compass. ‘While capturing certain opportunities, we must also strategically focus. We need to maintain strategic resolve, proceed steadily, and steadfastly follow a hardware-centered profit model. We will restrain the boundaries of development, strengthen our core competitiveness, and build a solid foundation for ‘silicon-based black land.’’” Meng Wanzhou said.

HarmonyOS crosses the line between life and death

ICT infrastructure business remains Huawei’s ballast. This business mainly includes building communication networks and providing hardware and software services to global carriers. With the peak of 5G construction now over, major operators are compressing capital expenditure. For example, China Mobile’s 2025 capital expenditure was only 150.9 billion yuan, down 8% year over year; and it is expected that 2026 capital expenditure will further fall to 136.6 billion yuan, 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. 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 consumer device business is the next most widely known. In 2025, it recorded full-year sales revenue of 344.47B yuan, up 1.6% year over year, with revenue volume close to that of the ICT infrastructure business.

Due to U.S. restrictions, Huawei phones’ core market remains China. And in recent years, China’s smartphone market has remained sluggish, which will inevitably affect the device business. Data from IDC shows that in 2025, China’s smartphone market shipped approximately 284 million units for the year, down 0.6% year over year. Among them, Huawei ranked first in China with a 16.4% market share, 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 the Enjoy 90 series of entry-level phones. The entire lineup is equipped with the Kirin 8 series chipset. This means that Kirin chipset 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.

Regarding the key HarmonyOS ecosystem, Huawei disclosed that as of the end of 2025, terminal devices running HarmonyOS 5 and HarmonyOS 6 reached 36 million units, HarmonyOS developers exceeded 10 million, and the number of apps and services that users can obtain through the app market surpassed 350k.

“The starting point and the endpoint of the ecosystem are both developers. Only when developers and partners succeed first can Huawei get the opportunity to survive and grow within a thriving ecosystem. As of the end of 2025, the HarmonyOS ecosystem has crossed the line between life and death.” Meng Wanzhou said.

Beyond phones, another important segment of Huawei’s consumer device business is the Huawei Select (智选车) vehicles business. It is understood that under the Hongmeng Zhixing brand, there are brands such as AITO, Zhijie, Enjoy, Zunji, Shangjie, and so on. In 2025, the company delivered 589k new cars, up 32% year over year.

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

Huawei Cloud is the only business whose performance is relatively weak. In 2025, it achieved sales revenue of 77.31B yuan, down 3.5% year over year. Some analysts believe that on the one hand, internet cloud vendors are actively stepping up investment in large models and AI applications, using low pricing to capture market share, intensifying industry competition; on the other hand, Huawei internally has insisted on high-quality development and proactively scaled back businesses with low gross margins and long billing cycles.

Huawei stated that as of the end of December 2025, Huawei Cloud had covered 34 geographic regions and 101 availability zones worldwide, providing services to customers in more than 170 countries and regions. Among them, in the China market, 95% of China’s top 30 automakers and more than 90% of China’s top 50 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 opportunities from the development of artificial intelligence; the consumer device business tackled challenges head-on, and the HarmonyOS ecosystem crossed the experience-critical threshold; the digital energy business insisted on quality first; Huawei Cloud focused on core businesses to build competitiveness; and the intelligent car solutions business achieved rapid development.

“Now is the moment to draw in our power, so we can strike more forcefully 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 drawn into an expansion impulse of “hitting multiple points at once,” trying to build their own “closed-loop ecosystem.” But Huawei made a different choice: it clearly decided to strengthen strategic focus and concentrate resources on areas that can form long-term competitive moats.

Taking the most attention-grabbing phone business as an example, Huawei did not pursue extreme breakthroughs in revenue scale and profit. Instead, with the gradual recovery of its chip supply chain, it stabilized product pricing and, through more cost-effective pricing strategies, continued to expand the user base of the HarmonyOS ecosystem.

In its financial report, Meng Wanzhou sent a clear signal: “We need to be brave in strategically letting things go and grow alongside the pioneers of the times. Doing subtraction well is to do multiplication better; drawing in our power right now is to strike more powerfully in the future.”

Specifically, in the connectivity industry, Huawei has in recent years launched internally the “Tianshui Plan,” the “Dishu(i) Plan,” and the “Pacific Plan.” These three plans aim to explore new sources of traffic growth and market opportunities.

Among them, the “Tianshui Plan” mainly focuses on building an intelligent connectivity ecosystem, developing more “traffic entry points” in wireless fields such as 5G and 5G-A; the “Dishu(i) Plan” focuses on the three key fixed-network scenarios of data centers, smart parks, and digital homes; the “Pacific Plan” centers on computing power, integrates computing, storage, and network resources, and, through “compute-network-storage” coordinated innovation, empowers customers in the fields of computing and storage.

In the computing industry, Huawei has clearly proposed building scale computing power advantages around “clusters + super nodes.” In fact, Huawei no longer relies on extreme breakthroughs in single-chip performance. Instead, through a system engineering approach, it efficiently interconnects thousands of chips to form a logically unified supercomputer, thereby enabling a leapfrog improvement in overall computing power. In addition, Huawei will open its motherboards and modules to empower partners, accelerating the productization of “enterprise edge small computing power” offerings, and making Kunpeng and Ascend computing power ubiquitous.

At the device level, “AI entering the end (device)” is becoming a core direction of the next round of technological transformation. Huawei uses the HarmonyOS operating system and the Xiaoyi intelligent agent as its key tools to promote the systematic 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 been officially launched.

On R&D investment, Huawei has not cut spending despite the slowdown in revenue growth. In 2025, Huawei’s R&D investment reached 192.3 billion yuan, about 21.8% of full-year revenue, setting a record high; over the past decade, cumulative R&D expenses exceeded 1,382.0 billion yuan. As of the end of 2025, Huawei had about 114k R&D employees, 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 transition of strategy into the battlefield, deeply cultivate the developer ecosystem, and walk the 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, 2026 to September 30, 2026, Wang Tao will serve as Rotating Chair, which will also be the first time Wang Tao takes on this role. According to information on Huawei’s official website, Huawei currently has three Rotating Chairs: Xu Zhijun, Meng Wanzhou, and Wang Tao.