Chinese telecoms giant Huawei on Friday announced a sharp drop in its net profit over the past year due to the economy and US sanctions.
“In 2022, a difficult business environment and non-market factors continued to weigh on Huawei’s business,” Huawei Chairman Eric Xu said at a news conference.
During this period, Huawei achieved a profit of 35.6 billion yuan ($4.7 billion), compared to 113.7 billion yuan a year earlier (-68.7%).
It was his finest historical performance at the time.
On the other hand, the group’s revenue increased slightly year-on-year (+0.9%) to 642.3 billion yuan. In 2021, it was down more than 28%.
The Company is not a publicly traded company and is therefore not subject to the same accounting certification or disclosure requirements when publishing its results as publicly traded groups.
Huawei did not disclose details on the number of cell phones sold in the past year.
Former US President Donald Trump’s administration blacklisted Huawei in 2019, banning US companies from selling it sensitive technology, including microprocessors.
The current Joe Biden administration has not changed this policy.
The sanctions cut Huawei off from global component supply chains, but also from Google’s Android operating system, which is present on the vast majority of the world’s smartphones.
This situation has severely weakened Huawei’s phone division, which sold its entry-level brand Honor in 2020, in recent years.
Huawei is also the world’s leading 5G OEM.
But Washington has pressured its allies to abandon the brand to equip their 5G networks, arguing that Beijing could use Huawei to monitor a country’s communications and traffic.
The Company is now refocusing on the Chinese market and diversifying its activities, particularly in cloud computing (“cloud”), connected cars and chip design.
Based in Shenzhen, southern China, Huawei employs around 207,000 people and is present in more than 170 countries.