The company had been founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former Deputy Regimental Chief in the People’s Liberation Army focusing on manufacturing phone switches later Huawei started expending its business and  building telecommunications networks, providing operational and consulting services and equipment to enterprises inside and outside of China, and to  manufacture communications devices for the consumer market.  194,000 employees as of December 2019 work in Huawei. Huawei sells its products and deployed its services in more than 170 countries and areas. It has overtaken Ericsson in 2012 as the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, and has overtaken Apple in 2018 as the second-largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world, behind Samsung Electronics. In 2018, Huawei had reported that its annual revenue was US$108.5 billion. In July 2020, Huawei has surpassed Samsung and Apple to become the top smartphone brand according to the number of shipping phones in the world for the first time.