https://x.com/i/article/2102710878433058816

Huawei’s Lazarus Moment

Six years after severe U.S. sanctions, Huawei engineered a path back by shifting to wearables, solar energy, telecom, and AI chips to rebuild overseas revenue.

Mention Huawei, and the conversation quickly turns to U.S. sanctions and China’s drive for technological self-sufficiency.

That story usually revolves around two products. One is the premium smartphone, often priced above $799, powered by Huawei-designed chips and competing with Apple and Samsung. The other is the AI processor, designed to meet China’s growing computing needs and challenge Nvidia. Together, they embody China’s effort to reduce its dependence on foreign technology, including chip manufacturing by TSMC.

But another question gets less attention. Huawei is, ultimately, a business. Can it still make money outside China when Washington has restricted so much of what it can buy and sell?

The initial damage was severe. Revenue across its three reported overseas regions fell by more than a third between 2019 and 2021. By 2025, however, it had climbed to about $35.6 billion, up 9% year over year and back to roughly three-quarters of its 2019 level. Huawei has also resumed promoting its phones more actively in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Has its overseas business finally reached a Lazarus moment?

Before the Smartphone, There Was the Network

To understand the recovery, start with what Huawei actually does.

Ren Zhengfei founded a telecom equipment company, not a smartphone brand. Huawei built its business around telephone switches and network infrastructure. It entered handsets through carrier-branded devices in the 2000s. Richard Yu later helped turn it into a consumer brand in its own right.

Much of the company still follows that original logic: build an adjacent business from technology it already understands. Expertise in powering telecom networks extended into data center power systems and solar inverters. Smartphones produced an ecosystem of watches and earbuds. Connectivity, electronics and China’s EV boom created an automotive business supplying lidar, vehicle components and assisted-driving technology. That operation is now housed in Yinwang Intelligent Technologies.

This breadth matters when assessing the sanctions.

Washington’s restrictions did not strike every business equally. Telecom equipment faced exclusion in the U.S. and mounting restrictions in parts of Europe, driven by national-security concerns. Huawei’s addition to the Entity List in 2019 cut off access to Google Mobile Services, or GMS, for new phones. Tighter chip controls in 2020 severed its manufacturing relationship with TSMC.

The phones still worked. But outside China, losing convenient access to Google’s services made them much harder to sell.

Nor did every European country adopt the same policy toward Huawei’s network equipment. Elsewhere, its sales teams still had customers in Latin America and Africa who needed to expand or replace their networks.

None of that could reverse the damage overnight. Huawei went from the world’s second-largest smartphone vendor in 2019 and third-largest in 2020 to outside the top five in 2021. Revenue across its overseas regions fell to roughly $30.7 billion that year, using the same exchange rate as the 2025 figure.

Huawei needed something to sell while it rebuilt.

The Long Way Back

U.S. sanctions crippled Huawei’s overseas smartphone business, but they did not close every route to its customers. Watches and earbuds could still reach consumers. Solar equipment could still serve energy projects. Telecom operators in countries that had not excluded Huawei could still buy its network infrastructure. These businesses faced different constraints—and offered different ways to keep earning revenue abroad.

Start with smartwatches. Huawei’s WATCH FIT line targeted buyers seeking affordable fitness and health features, while the WATCH GT series...

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