(Beijing) The Chinese telecoms giant Huawei announced Friday a turnover for 2021 down by nearly a third over one year, under the effect of US sanctions.
The group achieved between January and December a turnover of 634 billion yuan (126 billion CAN), indicated in a New Year message its president in office, Guo Ping.
A year earlier during this period, Huawei had sold 891.4 billion yuan (CAN 178 billion) worth of goods and services. The drop is therefore 29%.
Huawei has been at the center of the Sino-American rivalry for several years, against the backdrop of a trade and technological war between the two leading world powers.
“2022 will have its share of challenges,” Guo warned, citing “unpredictable times, the politicization of technological issues and a growing movement for de-globalization.”
Huawei had found itself in the crosshairs of the former Trump administration, which accused it, without providing any evidence, of potential espionage for the benefit of Beijing.
In 2019, Washington had blacklisted the group to prevent it from acquiring American technologies, essential to its products.
The Biden administration maintained these restrictions.
As the world’s leading supplier of network and telecom equipment, Huawei launched in 2003 in the cell phone niche.
It was once one of the top three smartphone manufacturers in the world, along with Korean Samsung and US Apple.
And it briefly held the number one spot, boosted by Chinese demand and sales in emerging markets.
But US sanctions, which notably cut the company off from global component supply chains, have left its smartphone business in limbo.
Huawei parted ways in late 2020 from Honor, its entry-level smartphone brand.
And because of the sanctions, he had to give up using the American Android system, which powers the vast majority of smartphones around the world.
The firm is also facing pressure on the 5G technology front, the deployment of which is accelerating.
The Trump administration had urged its allies to give up Huawei to equip their 5G network, arguing that Beijing could use the Chinese company to monitor a country’s communications and data traffic.
Based in Shenzhen in southern China, Huawei has some 197,000 employees and is present in more than 170 countries.