Huawei Investment & Holding, the parent of Huawei Technologies, is a private company with no stock market listing. Its 2025 annual report names only two shareholders: a trade union body that runs an employee shareholding scheme, and founder Ren Zhengfei. The report shows 127.4 billion yuan of cash flow from operations in 2025, while total borrowings fell to 239.3 billion yuan, most of it bank loans.

2025 figures from the annual report

  • Revenue: 880.9 billion yuan, up 2.2 percent.
  • Net profit: 68.0 billion yuan, up 8.7 percent.
  • Research and development (R&D) spending: 192.3 billion yuan, or 21.8 percent of revenue.
  • Cash flow from operating activities: 127.4 billion yuan, up 44.1 percent.
  • Cash and short-term investments: 361.4 billion yuan at year end.
  • Net cash used in investing: 74.8 billion yuan; in financing: 49.2 billion yuan.

Ownership: the employee scheme

The report says: “Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd. is a private company wholly owned by its employees.” Through the Union of Huawei Investment & Holding, the company runs an employee shareholding scheme, also called a virtual restricted shares plan. It involved 169,054 people, current employees or former employees who remain beneficiaries, at 31 December 2025. Ren’s investment was nearly 0.59 percent of total share capital. Huawei says it has about 213,000 employees. A commission of up to 161 representatives, elected by shareholding employees on a one-vote-per-share basis, approves the annual profit distribution and annual capital increases.

Who controls the union has been disputed. In April 2019, academics Christopher Balding of Fulbright University Vietnam and Donald Clarke of George Washington University argued in a paper that the holding company was about 99 percent owned by a trade union committee and that, if that stake is genuine and the committee works the way Chinese trade unions generally do, Huawei could be considered effectively state-owned, according to The China Project’s summary. The paper also said employees hold a contract-based virtual stock with profit rights but no votes. Huawei disputed the paper. Board secretary Jiang Xisheng told reporters on 25 April 2019 that employees own 100 percent of the company and that no state-owned enterprise holds a stake, Yicai Global reported. “I can be quite sure that there is no state-owned capital in Huawei and this is very clear,” Jiang said. He cited a 2001 Shenzhen government regulation as the legal basis for holding employee shares through the union.

Loans and bonds

Total borrowings were 239.3 billion yuan at the end of 2025, down from 264.9 billion yuan a year earlier and 308.4 billion yuan at the end of 2023, according to the report’s five-year summary. At the end of 2025:

  • Unsecured bank loans were 201.2 billion yuan, almost all in yuan at variable rates of 2.10 to 2.75 percent.
  • Corporate bonds were 38.1 billion yuan: 20.5 billion yuan of yuan notes and 17.6 billion yuan of US dollar bonds.

Bank loans were 84 percent of borrowings (Lens arithmetic). In 2025, Huawei drew 55.6 billion yuan of new loans, repaid 53.9 billion yuan, issued 24.0 billion yuan of bonds and repaid 49.3 billion yuan. Rhodium Group, citing the same totals on 17 September 2026, said Huawei and China’s telecom carriers depend almost entirely on operating cash flow.

Huawei’s bond investor page lists 2026 issues on China’s interbank market: three short-term notes of 4 billion yuan each, due in late December 2026, and seven three-year medium-term notes totalling 26 billion yuan (Lens arithmetic), the latest on 22 October 2026, at coupons of 1.42 to 1.50 percent. Caproasia reported short-term commercial paper issues starting in March 2025.

On 22 October 2026, Bloomberg reported, citing an unnamed person, that Huawei secured a seven-year offshore yuan loan of 15 billion yuan (about $2.25 billion) from six Chinese lenders, including Bank of China, China Construction Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, for general corporate purposes. Bloomberg said it was Huawei’s first offshore syndicated loan since a HK$11.8 billion loan in 2020.

First half of 2026

Yicai Global reported that Huawei’s first-half revenue rose 9.6 percent to 467.8 billion yuan, net profit fell 36 percent to 23.8 billion yuan, and R&D spending rose 25 percent to 121.4 billion yuan, citing a filing on the Beijing Financial Assets Exchange website. Bloomberg reported negative cash flow of 39.9 billion yuan in the period, after rising memory costs led Huawei to stock up on supplies.

Related on Lens: Huawei’s Qingyun desktop, its Tau scaling law, and companies that scaled on little outside money.

Sources and notes

Read in part (relevant sections): Huawei’s 2025 annual report (PDF: five-year highlights, management discussion of finances, cash flow statement, note 24 on loans and borrowings, corporate governance section) and Rhodium Group (17 September 2026). Read in full: Huawei’s outstanding debt instruments page (as of 12 November 2026); Yicai Global on the board secretary’s remarks (29 April 2019) and on first-half results (1 September 2026); Bloomberg’s loan report as republished by The Edge Malaysia; and Caproasia, whose headline gives the amount as $2.7 billion with an unclear currency label. The Balding and Clarke paper on SSRN and the South China Morning Post coverage of it could not be opened (access errors); the paper’s argument is taken from The China Project and Yicai. Huawei’s first-half 2026 filing was not read; those figures are Yicai’s and Bloomberg’s. The bond page no longer lists the $2 billion bond and 4 billion yuan note that the annual report showed maturing in 2026. Thumbnail photo: “HuaweiCanada8” by Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC0; cropped. The Huawei logo on the upper floors of the company's Canadian office building in Markham, Ontario. Illustrative photo.

Image: Lens chart built from the figures above. Thumbnail: Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).