Huawei is dropping tons and tons of cash into their R&D department, clocking in at $15.3 billion for 2018. It's growing really quickly, and most importantly, it's outpacing almost everyone else in tech.
Huawei wants to get a leg up on 5G networks, even though they're currently in the middle of some policy disputes with the US government. But even without the US market, there's still a huge chunk of the world that could potentially buy Huawei network equipment once 5G starts to pick up the pace on its rollout.
Amazon still manages to lead in R&D spending each year with a $28.8 billion budget, but Alphabet and Samsung are both still ahead of Huawei. Samsung is only spending about $1.5 billion more per year, however, so that may change in the next few years.
And they're still ahead of some other heavy hitters like Intel and Apple, both of whom are seriously invested in 5G networks.
Like it or not, 2019 and beyond are going to be heavily focused on the network side of the smartphone industry. 5G is here, and we're pretty close to seeing it explode.
source: Bloomberg
