Apple rival Huawei went from switch vendor to chip maker

Apple rival Huawei went from switch vendor to chip maker

Huawei, which was founded in 1984, is about the same age as Qualcomm, which was founded in 1985.

Qualcomm, an established telecommunications company, merged with Omninet in 1988 and generated $32 million in revenue the following year. Huawei is a typical Chinese startup that started from scratch. Huawei was co-founded by Ren Zhengfei with a registered capital of just 21,000 renminbi and 14 employees.

Although Huawei was known as a technology company in its early years, it was actually a "second-channel vendor" of switches. It was not until around 1990 that Huawei began to develop its own switches that it finally became a "major player" in the technology industry.

Switches are the infrastructure of communication, and chips account for the highest percentage of the cost. In order to seize the "lifeblood" of chips, Huawei established Integrated Circuit Corporation in 1991 and began to develop switch chips by itself. Ren recruited some of the country's technology elites, including Huawei's chip founder Xu Wenwei, who was proficient in circuit design and assembly language, and led Huawei's chip design.

It is well known that chip research and development is very expensive, and Huawei was so tight that Ren Zhengfei even borrowed money from a loan shark to maintain the operation.

Fortunately, Huawei's first ASIC chip succeeded in streaming. In 1993, Huawei's first self-developed switch chip, SD509, came out.

Although the functionality is relatively backward, but at least a good start. Over the next decade, Huawei gradually developed more powerful chips.