Despite U.S. Sanctions... China’s Huawei Posts 185 Trillion Won in Sales Last Year

Second-Highest Sales Performance on Record
16.4% Share of Chinese Smartphone Market...Overtakes Apple for No. 1

Despite U.S. sanctions, Huawei’s sales last year reached 880 billion yuan (about 185 trillion won), marking the second-highest performance in its history, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in Hong Kong reported on February 24.

Huawei Chairman Liang Hua attended the “2026 Guangdong High-Quality Development Conference,” hosted by the Guangdong provincial government in China that day, and disclosed last year’s revenue, saying, “We are maintaining stable operations in order to provide globally competitive products and services.”

This performance is not only the second-largest amount after the record high sales of about 891 billion yuan in 2020, but also represents a 2.3% increase compared with 2024 sales of 860 billion yuan (about 180.6 trillion won).

Huawei showed particularly rapid recovery in the smartphone segment last year. According to market research firm IDC, Huawei shipped 46.7 million smartphones last year, achieving a 16.4% share of the mainland Chinese market and narrowly overtaking Apple (16.2%) to take first place. In the 2024 market share survey, Vivo ranked first (17.2%), Huawei second (16.6%), and Apple third (15.5%).

This is the first time since 2020, when access to advanced semiconductors and the Android operating system was restricted due to U.S. sanctions, that Huawei has captured the No. 1 smartphone market share in China. The market views Huawei as having adapted to U.S. sanctions by leveraging its domestic demand base in China and reorganizing its business structure.

The number of users of Huawei’s proprietary operating system HarmonyOS, which the company is rolling out, is also increasing rapidly. Chairman Liang explained at the venue that the number of devices running HarmonyOS 5 and the latest operating system HarmonyOS 6 exceeds 40 million, and that users can access more than 75,000 applications and services.

He stressed, “More developers and partners are joining the HarmonyOS ecosystem,” adding that the industry must combine its overall expertise to promote the integration of the real economy and the digital economy and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes worldwide.

Beyond electronic devices, Huawei is also accelerating the build-out of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, including its self-designed Ascend chips. Chairman Liang stated that at least 43 major large-scale AI models have been pre-trained on Ascend chips, and that more than 200 open-source models are compatible with the Ascend ecosystem.