Huawei back from the brink with 9% annual sales jump
China's tech powerhouse Huawei has reported its best financial numbers in years, with annual sales of USD 98.7 billion.
The company said resurgent smartphone and 5G equipment sales were the key contributors to its FY2023 performance, which was a 9% improvement on 2022. Sales jumped to USDS 98.7 billion, while Q4 revenue leapt by 27% to around USD 34 million.
Huawei enjoyed a long run as a rising star in smartphones through the 2010s. But it began to struggle when the US introduced sanctions and Huawei was cut off from overseas suppliers in 2019.
However, the firm mounted a comeback in 2023 after releasing the Mate 60 Pro. This smartphone is powered by the 7nm Kirin processor, which was made in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC). The Mate 60 Pro is capable of download speeds exceeding those of top line 5G phones, and it appeared to show that Chinese chipmakers were coming close to emulating their western counterparts.
Huawei's comeback can also be partly attributed to its growing business in semiconductors. In the summer there was speculation that Huawei Technologies was building a network of hidden semiconductor fabrication facilities across China in order to avoid US sanctions.
According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), Huawei has received an estimated USD 30 billion in support from the Chinese government to accelerate these efforts. Huawei is said to have bought at least two existing plants and is developing three more.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Evertiq reported that Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon was making significant gains in AI chips such as the next-gen Ascend 910B. It was deploying these products in its own public cloud infrastructure, while also selling big volumes to Chinese companies such as Baidu and iFlytek.
“After years of hard work, we’ve managed to weather the storm. And now we’re pretty much back on track,” Huawei’s rotating chairman, Ken Hu, said in a message to employees. “We have to be aware that changes in the business environment are not caused by geopolitical conflict alone, but also by fluctuating global economic cycles.”
