RIO DE JANEIRO: Surrounded by the turquoise waters of the Atlantic and dotted with native fig trees, the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha is one of Brazil’s most coveted tourist destinations.
Home to about 3,000 residents, it greets roughly 40 times that number of visitors each year, placing immense strain on an isolated power grid kept alive largely by boatloads of diesel fuel.
That strain is set to ease later this year, with the installation of one of Latin America’s largest energy-storage projects. Among the equipment suppliers is Huawei Technologies Co.
Best known for its smartphones and 5G telecommunications (telecoms) infrastructure, the Shenzhen-based powerhouse has, in recent years, quietly positioned itself as part of the backbone of the global energy transition.
Its clean energy empire, Huawei Digital Power Technology Co, offers everything from battery storage and solar inverters to electric vehicle (EV)-charging services.
As the United States and Europe become more hostile, emerging markets like Brazil are becoming increasingly important for the business.
With sales of more than US$11bil last year, Huawei Digital Power accounts for a relatively small chunk of the parent company’s overall US$126bil revenue pile.
Still, in terms of scale, it’s not far behind Tesla Inc’s energy division or Sungrow Power Supply Co, China’s homegrown renewable energy equipment leader, both of which reported sales of about US$13bil in 2025.
The unit is also a useful source of diversification and growth.
Since the United States imposed sweeping sanctions on the company in 2019, Huawei’s cutting-edge routers and base stations have effectively been banned across much of the West, while its smartphone business, which once eclipsed Samsung Electronics Co and Apple Inc in global shipments, has dropped out of the world’s top five.
Last year, overall revenue ticked up just 2%, the slowest in three years, while Huawei Digital Power’s revenue grew by double digits.
Huawei is exploring other ways to monetise its energy business too, including a recent attempt to sell the unit to Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (CATL) that foundered over the unit’s valuation, sources said.
Huawei had sought at least 200 billion yuan, while CATL, the world’s biggest battery maker, valued the unit closer to 150 billion yuan, one of the sources added.
A spokesperson for CATL said the company had no intention to acquire the business and had not discussed acquiring it. Huawei did not respond to requests for comment.
Huawei’s “expansion into clean energy and related sectors is a pivot, the scale and urgency of which has been really accelerated by US sanctions”, said William Kirby, a Harvard professor, who studies Chinese businesses and co-authored the 2024 case study Huawei: Resilience amid Autarky and Adversity.
With trillions of dollars flowing into the global energy transition every year, he said, “it makes very good strategic sense”.
Countries spent US$2.3 trillion on clean technologies of all sorts last year, more than double 2020 levels, according to BloombergNEF.
And that’s only half of what’s needed annually for the rest of the decade.
“There is a huge business opportunity,” said Margaret Jackson, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Chinese companies are by far the dominant suppliers of the equipment needed to generate and store solar and wind power.
And Huawei’s expansion into clean energy has been years in the making.
The company has been accruing clean energy patents since at least 2010, when it registered one for a control system that optimises power output from solar arrays.
The following year, Beijing released its first major policies to support domestic solar energy deployment, kicking off explosive demand for installations across the country.
“2010 was a perfect time for Huawei to join the Chinese solar market,” said Timothy Shen, a senior research analyst at consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Since then, Huawei has added 2,000 more patents.
Huawei Digital Power’s success lies in its breakout product, introduced in 2013: the string inverter.
The device, which sits at the end of a row of solar panels and converts energy from the sun into usable grid electricity, quickly gained traction in the industry.
Before they were cheaply and widely available, developers relied on central inverters, which connected to multiple rows at a time and were less efficient and harder to maintain.
In 2015, Huawei overtook German industrial titan SMA Solar Technology AG to become the world’s top maker of solar inverters, a title it has held ever since.
Huawei Digital Power was carved out as a wholly owned subsidiary company in 2021.
Since then, it has aided a microgrid buildout in Saudi Arabia to power a tourism zone hundreds of times the size of Manhattan, supplied giant batteries to Peruvian medical centres struggling to cope with power outages and installed EV-charging infrastructure in the foothills of Mount Everest.
In Brazil, Huawei’s footprint is modest but growing, with Latin America’s overall energy-storage market expected to grow 8% a year through 2034, according to Wood Mackenzie.
The company has inked battery storage deals that can power about 90,000 homes daily and supplied more solar inverters across the country than anyone else, according to Roberto Valer, Huawei Digital Power Brazil’s chief technology officer. — Bloomberg
