Huawei's revenue in 2025 reached 880.9 billion yuan, only 1.05 billion yuan less than its historical peak. Meng Wanzhou: We need to restrain the boundaries of development.
On the evening of March 31st, Huawei quietly disclosed its 2025 financial report on its official website. The overall business results met expectations.
Specifically, in 2025, Huawei achieved global sales revenue of 880.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.2%; the net profit was 68 billion yuan, a growth of 8.8%. Comparing with historical performance, in 2025, Huawei's revenue scale was second only to the 891.4 billion yuan in 2020, ranking as the second-highest point in Huawei's history.
However, compared with the revenue growth rate of over 20% in 2024, Huawei's development pace in 2025 significantly slowed down. Behind this is Huawei's intention to shrink its front line and concentrate on coping with the challenges of the AI era.
△Photo source: Photographed by a reporter from Time Weekly
Huawei's rotating chairman, Meng Wanzhou, pointed out in her speech that artificial intelligence may be the last technological revolution in human history, destined to be full of ups and downs and also bound to be magnificent. We firmly believe that this will be the biggest development opportunity in the next decade or even a longer period, and also the most certain strategic opportunity. In the past 30-odd years, our unremitting exploration and solid accumulation are precisely for seizing this major technological revolution in human history.
At the same time, she also said that the macro environment remains severe, and uncertainties continue to increase. When sailing in the fog, the accuracy of the compass is more important than the speed of progress. "While seizing certain opportunities, we should focus more on strategy. We should maintain strategic focus, make steady progress, adhere to the hardware-based core profit model, restrain the development boundary, strengthen the core competitiveness, and build a solid 'silicon-based black land,'" Meng Wanzhou said.
The HarmonyOS ecosystem has crossed the survival line
The ICT infrastructure business remains Huawei's ballast stone. This business mainly includes building communication networks and providing hardware equipment and software services for global operators. Currently, the peak of 5G construction has passed, and major operators are compressing their capital expenditures. For example, China Mobile's capital expenditure in 2025 was only 150.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 8%; it is expected that the capital expenditure in 2026 will further drop to 136.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 9.5%.
Even so, Huawei's ICT infrastructure business revenue still increased in 2025, reaching 375.014 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.6%, and it remains the business unit with the largest revenue share. Meng Wanzhou commented: "The connectivity industry has overcome the impact of the industrial investment cycle."
The most well-known consumer business follows closely. In 2025, it achieved annual sales revenue of 344.473 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 1.6%, and the revenue scale is close to that of the ICT infrastructure business.
Restricted by the US ban, Huawei's core mobile phone market is still in China. However, the Chinese mobile phone market has been in a continuous downturn in recent years, which is bound to have an impact on the consumer business. IDC data shows that the annual shipment volume of the Chinese smartphone market in 2025 was about 284 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 0.6%. Among them, Huawei ranked first in the domestic market with a market share of 16.4%, a year-on-year decline of 1.9%.
However, with the continuous improvement of the supply chain and the steady increase in production capacity, Huawei's market coverage and supply capacity in multiple price segments have been restored. On March 23rd, Huawei released the Enjoy 90 series of entry-level mobile phones, all of which are equipped with Kirin 8 series chips. This means that the production capacity of Kirin chips can support the shipment of a larger scale of entry-level products. Now, from the Mate, Pura, and nova series to the entry-level Enjoy series, Huawei has fully returned to the full price segment products.
In terms of the crucial HarmonyOS ecosystem, Huawei revealed that as of the end of 2025, the number of terminal devices equipped with HarmonyOS 5 and HarmonyOS 6 reached 36 million, the number of HarmonyOS developers exceeded 10 million, and the number of applications and services available to users through the app market exceeded 350,000.
△Photo source: Huawei's official website
"The starting point and end point of the ecosystem are developers. Only when developers and partners succeed first can Huawei have the opportunity to survive and develop in a prosperous ecosystem. As of the end of 2025, the HarmonyOS ecosystem has crossed the survival line," Meng Wanzhou said.
In addition to mobile phones, another important segment of Huawei's consumer business is Huawei's intelligent selection of cars. It is reported that there are brands such as AITO, Zhijie, Xiangjie, Zunjie, and Shangjie under Hongmeng Zhixing. In 2025, a total of 589,000 new cars were delivered, a year-on-year increase of 32%.
The two core industries of ICT and consumer business contributed about 82% of Huawei's revenue. At the same time, Huawei's other emerging businesses are also growing steadily. Among them, the revenue of the digital energy business reached 77.312 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.7%; the revenue of the intelligent automotive solutions business was 45.018 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 72.1%, becoming the segment with the highest growth rate among all business lines.
Only Huawei Cloud's performance was relatively weak. In 2025, it achieved sales revenue of 32.161 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of 3.5%. Some analysts believe that on the one hand, Internet cloud providers are actively increasing their investment in large models and AI applications, seizing the market at low prices, and the industry competition has further intensified; on the other hand, Huawei adheres to high-quality development internally and actively reduces businesses with low gross margins and long payment terms.
Huawei said that as of the end of December 2025, Huawei Cloud has covered 34 geographical regions and 101 availability zones globally, providing services to customers in more than 170 countries and regions. Among them, in the Chinese market, 95% of the top 30 Chinese automakers and more than 90% of the top 50 Chinese Internet companies have chosen Huawei Cloud.
Overall, Meng Wanzhou pointed out that in 2025, Huawei's connectivity industry overcame the impact of the industrial investment cycle; the computing industry seized the development opportunity of artificial intelligence; the consumer business overcame difficulties, and the HarmonyOS ecosystem crossed the experience critical point; the digital energy business adhered to quality first; Huawei Cloud focused on building competitiveness in core businesses; and the intelligent automotive solutions business achieved rapid development.
"Retracting the fist now is for a more powerful punch in the future"
The slowdown of Huawei's development pace is not a passive move but the result of an active strategic adjustment.
In the context of the rapid advancement of the AI wave, enterprises are prone to fall into the expansion impulse of "hitting on multiple fronts" and try to build their own "closed-loop ecosystem." However, Huawei has made a different choice, clearly stating that it will focus its resources on areas that can form long-term competitive barriers through strategic focus.
Taking the most concerned mobile phone business as an example, Huawei did not pursue extreme breakthroughs in revenue scale and profit. Instead, in the context of the gradual recovery of the chip supply chain, it stabilized product prices and continuously expanded the user scale of the HarmonyOS ecosystem through a more cost-effective pricing strategy.
Meng Wanzhou sent a clear signal in the financial report: "We should dare to make strategic sacrifices and grow together with the pioneers of the era. Doing subtraction is for better multiplication; retracting the fist now is for a more powerful punch in the future."
Specifically, in the connectivity industry, Huawei has launched the "Tianshui Plan," "Dishui Plan," and "Pacific Plan" internally in recent years. These three plans aim to explore new traffic growth points and market space.
Among them, the "Tianshui Plan" mainly focuses on building an intelligent connectivity ecosystem and creating more "traffic entrances" in wireless fields such as 5G and 5G-A; the "Dishui Plan" focuses on three core fixed-network scenarios: data centers, smart campuses, and digital homes; the "Pacific Plan" takes computing power as the core, integrates computing, storage, and network resources, and empowers customers in the computing and storage fields through the collaborative innovation of "computing, network, and storage."
In the computing industry, Huawei clearly proposed to build a large-scale computing power advantage around the "cluster + super node." In fact, Huawei no longer relies on the extreme breakthrough of single-chip performance. Instead, through a systems engineering approach, it efficiently interconnects thousands of chips to form a logically unified supercomputer, thereby achieving a leapfrog improvement in overall computing power. In addition, Huawei will also open up motherboards and modules to empower partners, accelerate the serialization of "enterprise edge small computing power" products, and promote the ubiquitousness of Kunpeng and Ascend computing power.
At the terminal level, "AI entering the terminal" is becoming the core direction of the new round of technological revolution. Huawei takes the HarmonyOS operating system and the Xiaoyi intelligent agent as the core means to promote the systematic embedding of AI capabilities into the terminal system. It is reported that under the framework of the HarmonyOS intelligent agent, more than 80 HarmonyOS application intelligent agents have been officially launched.
In terms of R & D investment, Huawei did not reduce its investment due to the slowdown of revenue growth. In 2025, Huawei's R & D investment reached 192.3 billion yuan, accounting for about 21.8% of the annual revenue, hitting a record high; the cumulative R & D expenses in the past decade exceeded 1.382 trillion yuan. As of the end of 2025, Huawei had about 114,000 R & D employees, accounting for 53.7% of the total number of employees in the company.
"We are firmly moving towards an uncertain tomorrow. We will maintain strategic focus, adhere to strategic focus, accelerate the transformation from strategy to the battlefield, deeply cultivate the developer ecosystem, and take the path of high-quality development," Meng Wanzhou said.
In addition, in terms of personnel layout, Huawei issued an announcement saying that according to the company's rotating chairman system, from April 1st to September 30th, 2026, Wang Tao will serve as the rotating chairman. This is also Wang Tao's first time to take on this position. According to the information on Huawei's official website, currently, Huawei has three rotating chairmen, namely Xu Zhijun, Meng Wanzhou, and Wang Tao.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Time Weekly" (ID: timeweekly), author: Xie Silin. Republished by 36Kr with permission.