The Chinese telecoms giant Huawei announced Friday a sharp decline in its net profit last year, due in particular to the American sanctions which seriously weaken its sales of telephones.
In a context of technological rivalry with China, the administration of former US President Donald Trump blacklisted Huawei in 2019.
A measure that prohibits American companies from selling sensitive technologies, including microprocessors. The current administration of Joe Biden has not changed this policy.
The sanctions thus cut off Huawei from global component supply chains, but also from Google’s Android operating system, present on the vast majority of smartphones in the world.
This situation has greatly weakened the telephone branch of Huawei in recent years, which had separated in 2020 from its entry-level brand, Honor.
In this context, Huawei announced on Friday a net profit down nearly 69% year on year for the year 2022.
The group posted a profit of 35.6 billion yuan (4.7 billion euros), against 113.7 billion yuan a year earlier. It was then his best historical performance.
On the other hand, the group’s turnover is slightly up over one year (+0.9%), at 642.3 billion yuan (85.8 billion euros).
In 2021, it was down more than 28%.
“External factors”
“In 2022, a difficult business environment and non-market factors continued to weigh on Huawei’s business,” Huawei Chairman Eric Xu said in a statement, without explicitly mentioning the sanctions.
The brand was once one of the top three smartphone makers in the world, along with Korea’s Samsung and America’s Apple.
And it briefly held the number one spot, boosted by Chinese demand and sales in emerging markets.
Huawei did not release details of the number of cellphones it sold last year.
The firm 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 groups on the stock exchange.
Huawei is also the world’s leading 5G equipment supplier.
But Washington has pressured its allies to give up the brand to equip their 5G networks, arguing that Beijing could use Huawei to monitor a country’s communications and data traffic.
The firm is now refocusing on the Chinese market and diversifying its activities, particularly in cloud computing (“cloud”), connected cars and chip design.
Based in Shenzhen in southern China, Huawei has some 207,000 employees and is present in more than 170 countries.