(Beijing) Huawei announced a 14% year-on-year drop in first-quarter revenue on Thursday, as the Chinese telecom giant remains penalized by US sanctions.
Posted at 7:31 a.m.
In the January-March period, Huawei’s revenue amounted to 131 billion yuan, up from 152.2 billion yuan a year earlier.
In the first quarter, “our consumer activity was very strongly penalized”, noted in a press release the group’s current president, Ken Hu, without going into details.
Huawei was once one of the top three smartphone makers in the world, along with Korea’s Samsung and America’s Apple.
And the brand briefly held the number one spot, boosted by Chinese demand and sales in emerging markets.
But US sanctions in 2018, which notably cut the company off from global component supply chains, had plunged its smartphone branch into uncertainty.
Washington has also urged its allies to give up Huawei to equip their 5G networks, arguing that Beijing could use the firm to monitor a country’s communications and data traffic.
Faced with American pressure, Huawei has refocused on the Chinese market and is diversifying its activities, particularly in cloud computing and the connected car.
In the first quarter, the infrastructure branch of the group (which provides connectivity, networks and peripherals) thus experienced “robust growth”, underlined Ken Hu.
However, Huawei warned on Thursday that 2022 could be an “even more difficult” year for the group than last year, due to “more uncertainties and external challenges than before”.
Huawei has notably reported disruptions to its supply chains, at a time when several regions of China are subject to more or less strict confinements due to an outbreak of COVID-19.
In March, the metropolis of Shenzhen, where the group’s headquarters is located, had itself been put under a bell.
Huawei has some 195,000 employees and is present in more than 170 countries.
The company is not listed and is therefore not subject to the same obligations of certification of accounts or details in the publication of its results as listed groups.