In her December 2025 New Year address, Huawei Rotating Chairwoman Meng Wanzhou (Sabrina Meng) reviewed the company’s major achievements in 2025 and outlined seven primary arenas for development in 2026. The speech signaled a clear strategic shift from broad-based technological expansion toward focused ecosystem building and a more explicit role as an industrial enabler. This repositioning reflects both Huawei’s evolving corporate priorities and China’s changing place in the global technology order amid intensifying US–China competition. By defining these seven arenas, Meng acknowledged the scale of the challenges ahead while reaffirming Huawei’s resolve to consolidate its core strengths and compete decisively across multiple high-value domains.
Resilient Execution Under Pressure: Huawei’s Performance in 2025
Huawei’s 2025 performance, as outlined by Meng Wanzhou, reflects a year defined by resilience, disciplined execution, and strategic adaptation amid sustained external pressure. Despite ongoing geopolitical constraints and supply-chain challenges, the company demonstrated an ability to translate long-term strategy into concrete operational outcomes across multiple technology domains.
In connectivity, Huawei advanced the commercialization of 5G-A networks, serving approximately 60 million users. By integrating ultra-fast wireless 5G-A with F5G-A fiber-optic infrastructure, the company delivered a high-reliability, low-latency foundation for transportation, manufacturing, tourism, and urban governance. These deployments underscored Huawei’s capacity to scale critical infrastructure and operate effectively under demanding conditions.
The HarmonyOS ecosystem marked another milestone in 2025, with HarmonyOS 5.0 reaching 36 million devices. This progress signaled not only improved usability but also growing developer and user confidence in an independent operating system. Huawei’s emphasis on user experience and ecosystem maturity highlighted a sustained commitment to technological self-reliance in the mobile domain.
In intelligent mobility, Huawei further consolidated its role as an enabler rather than a manufacturer. Its Qiankun Intelligent Driving solutions were adopted by more than 1.4 million passenger vehicles, supporting nearly 7 billion kilometers of assisted driving. This scale positioned Huawei as a key provider of automotive AI capabilities, offering automakers advanced systems while avoiding direct entry into vehicle production.
Huawei also strengthened its domestic computing and AI ecosystem. Kunpeng, openEuler, and Ascend continued to expand in partners, developers, and deployments, supported by high-performance infrastructure such as the Atlas 900 SuperPoD. Together, these platforms reinforced Huawei’s ambition to anchor a self-sustaining computing stack aligned with China’s broader digital strategy.
Beyond platforms, Huawei emphasized the industrial application of AI, translating algorithms into measurable efficiency gains. From rapid medical pathology diagnosis and high-accuracy steel furnace prediction to intelligent oil and gas exploration and zero-carbon unmanned mining fleets, see the company demonstrated a pragmatic, engineering-driven approach focused on productivity, cost reduction, and operational reliability.
Finally, digital energy emerged as a strategic pillar linking ICT with sustainability. By supporting over 2 trillion kWh of green power and significantly reducing electricity consumption and carbon emissions, Huawei positioned itself at the intersection of digital infrastructure and the energy transition. Collectively, these outcomes illustrate a year in which Huawei not only endured external pressure but executed with precision, reinforcing its ecosystems, industrial relevance, and long-term competitiveness.
Seven Strategic Frontiers: Huawei’s High-Value Agenda for 2026
Huawei’s strategic roadmap for 2026 reflects a deliberate move away from broad, horizontal expansion toward deep engagement in seven high-value, long-term arenas. This recalibration underscores the company’s intent to concentrate resources on areas where technological depth, ecosystem control, and systemic impact can generate sustainable advantage.
The first arena centers on strengthening operations in vertical industries. Huawei plans to apply its integrated portfolio to accelerate intelligent transformation across manufacturing, energy, transportation, and other traditional sectors. By shifting from generalized digital offerings to scenario-specific solutions, the company aims to embed intelligence directly into industrial processes and reshape China’s digital solutions landscape.
The second arena focuses on expanding an open-source Kunpeng–Ascend computing ecosystem. Through Ascend, Kunpeng, and openEuler, Huawei is building an independent AI and computing stack designed to reduce reliance on US-controlled platforms such as x86 architectures, CUDA, and proprietary cloud APIs. This approach emphasizes long-term resilience, ecosystem participation, and strategic autonomy.
Intelligent connectivity constitutes the third arena. Huawei intends to integrate artificial intelligence more deeply into communications networks, enabling new architectures and services. This strategy seeks to transform telecom operators from passive “pipe providers” into intelligent service platforms capable of generating higher-value applications and traffic.
The fourth arena targets the prosperity of HarmonyOS and AI-driven consumer experiences. By prioritizing usability, intelligence, and ecosystem completeness, Huawei aims to solidify HarmonyOS as an independent mobile operating system. Success in this domain is viewed as essential to sustaining mobile OS sovereignty and long-term competitiveness in China’s consumer technology market.
The fifth arena lies in scaling Qiankun intelligent driving solutions in collaboration with automakers. Huawei will continue to position itself as a technology enabler, providing advanced autonomous and assisted-driving systems while avoiding direct vehicle manufacturing. This model allows for scalable deployment, risk control, and deep integration into the automotive value chain.
AI infrastructure efficiency defines the sixth arena. Huawei is rethinking data center architecture with a focus on maximizing “tokens per watt,” directly addressing the growing energy costs of AI training and inference. Liquid-cooled, high-efficiency data centers are central to supporting sustainable, industrial-scale AI deployment.
The seventh arena extends Huawei’s digital energy strategy through the development of liquid-cooled ultra-fast charging infrastructure. By integrating charging networks with energy systems, transportation, and ICT, Huawei seeks to support large-scale EV adoption while reinforcing its role as a provider of green, intelligent infrastructure.
Taken together, these seven high-value, long-term arenas illustrate Huawei’s evolution from a product-centric technology firm into an ecosystem builder, industry enabler, and green infrastructure provider. The 2026 strategy emphasizes systemic leadership, technological depth, and coordinated ecosystem development as the foundations of Huawei’s next phase of growth.
Technology, Power, and Positioning: A Strategic Reading of Huawei’s Trajectory
Huawei’s recent trajectory offers a revealing lens into China’s broader technological rise amid intensifying US–China competition. Beyond corporate performance, the company’s strategy reflects structural features of China’s innovation model and its evolving approach to global technological influence.
A central advantage lies in operational resilience. Huawei’s ability to deploy complex systems in extreme and resource-constrained environments highlights a form of system-level endurance that has strategic value, particularly in emerging markets. In contrast to many Western firms, which often face cost, scalability, and coordination constraints, Huawei’s execution capacity translates technological capability into rapid, large-scale implementation.
Ecosystem sovereignty represents another defining dimension. Through HarmonyOS, Kunpeng, Ascend, and open-source platforms such as openEuler and openGauss, Huawei is constructing a decoupled yet globally interoperable technology stack. Open-source functions less as an ideological commitment and more as a pragmatic tool for localization, resilience, and political risk management in a fragmented global technology environment.
Huawei’s approach to artificial intelligence further distinguishes China’s model from that of the United States. Rather than prioritizing frontier, model-centric research, Huawei emphasizes scenario-driven, efficiency-oriented AI applications. By embedding AI directly into industrial production, healthcare, energy, and transportation, the company generates measurable productivity gains and enhances operational stability, reinforcing AI as an instrument of industrial competitiveness.
Finally, Huawei’s integration of ICT, energy, and mobility infrastructure carries geopolitical significance. Green, off-grid, and digitally enabled infrastructure projects offer developing countries pathways to modernization aligned with climate objectives, simultaneously projecting China’s engineering capability and soft power. Underpinning these strategies is a structural asymmetry in governance: Huawei operates within a centralized, mission-oriented system that aligns capital, talent, and policy with unusual speed, contrasting with the regulatory fragmentation and shareholder-driven constraints faced by many US firms. Together, these factors position Huawei not merely as a technology company, but as a strategic actor within a shifting global technological order.
From Endurance to Influence: Synthesizing Huawei’s Strategic Trajectory
Huawei’s 2025 performance and its strategic orientation for 2026 together reveal a coherent transition from crisis management toward sustained, system-level influence. What began as a phase of survival under external pressure has evolved into a period of consolidation, in which operational resilience and ecosystem independence have become enduring strategic assets rather than temporary defenses.
This shift is most evident in Huawei’s move from product-centric competition to ecosystem-driven integration. While hardware such as smartphones, network equipment, and chips remains important, the company is increasingly focused on enabling entire industries through the convergence of AI, digital infrastructure, mobility, and energy systems. Value creation is no longer confined to individual products but arises from Huawei’s ability to orchestrate complex technological systems at scale.
At the same time, Huawei has progressed from a narrow focus on efficiency toward broader strategic leverage. By embedding AI and green technologies into industrial operations and energy infrastructure, the company delivers measurable economic and environmental gains while simultaneously advancing China’s objectives in technological self-reliance. These capabilities translate operational effectiveness into geopolitical and developmental influence.
The transition from a reactive to a proactive posture further defines this trajectory. Huawei’s seven primary arenas for 2026 reflect forward-looking choices designed to lock in advantages across AI computing, industrial intelligence, mobile ecosystems, and sustainable digital infrastructure. Rather than responding defensively to constraints, the company is shaping the contours of competition in areas with long-term strategic value.
Taken together, these developments suggest that resilience, ecosystem sovereignty, industrial AI integration, and green infrastructure are mutually reinforcing pillars of Huawei’s strategy. The company is no longer merely adapting to a hostile external environment; it is actively reshaping that environment. As Huawei enters 2026, it moves beyond tactical survival toward systemic leadership in industrialized intelligence and sustainable digital infrastructure, marking a decisive evolution in its global role.
Summary & Implications
In summary, Huawei’s recent evolution reflects a clear progression from capability accumulation to systemic leverage. During 2025, the company concentrated on building and stabilizing core competencies in next-generation connectivity, AI computing, HarmonyOS, intelligent mobility, and green energy infrastructure. In 2026, Huawei aims to translate these foundations into durable strategic advantage through deeper vertical integration, open-source AI ecosystems, intelligent connectivity, ecosystem empowerment, and globally scalable solutions—signaling a shift from foundational construction toward sustained strategic amplification.
References
- “Press Ahead: Spring Mountains Rise Beyond the Vast and Wild Plains, A New Year Message for 2026”. Sabrina Meng(Meng Wanzhou). December 2025. https://www.huawei.com/en/special-release/new-year-message-2026
- “Press Ahead: Spring Mountains Rise Beyond the Vast and Wild Plains, A New Year Message for 2026”. Sabrina Meng(Meng Wanzhou). December 2025. https://www.huawei.com/cn/special-release/new-year-message-2026