The Fortune Global 500 annual ranking measures the business revenue of the top businesses across industries. The companies generated revenues totalling more than one-third of the world’s GDP and employ 69.7 million people worldwide, however, their total revenue shrank over the past year. After reaching a record high of $33.3 trillion in the 2020 edition, total revenue for the world’s biggest 500 companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year. It was the first decline in half a decade. The culprit was the global COVID-19 pandemic that slammed huge swathes of the global economy as countries went into lockdown, but which was a boon for technology companies; a sector that not only demonstrated its importance to society but also managed to continue to grow in 2020. During the recent announcement of Huawei’s first-half results for 2021, during which Huawei’s net margin increased from 9.2% to 9.8% compared to the same period last year. Eric Xu, Huawei’s Rotating Chairman stated: “We’ve set our strategic goals for the next five years. We are confident that our carrier and enterprise businesses will continue to grow steadily.” The company has benefitted from its diverse business, operating in all regions in the world, in different markets from telecommunications to IT and energy, and from the increase in businesses digitizing across many different industries. Huawei also benefitted from its large patent portfolio with Jason Ding, head of Huawei’s intellectual property department, saying earlier this year that Huawei expects to rake in around $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in patent and licensing fees between 2019 and 2021. Huawei has one of the largest patent portfolios in the world and invested over 15% of its sales revenue into R&D last year in technologies such as 5G and Cloud.
