Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s ban, China-based telecommunications company Huawei says it sold 118 million smartphone units globally in the first half of 2019, a 24 percent year-over-year growth.
According to earnings that were released on July 30th, the company said it’s consumer business sales revenue totalled CNY 220.8 billion (about $42.3 billion CAD).
The earnings noted that the company experienced “rapid growth in its shipments of tablets, PCs, and wearables.”
“Revenue grew fast up through May,” Huawei’s chairman Liang Hua said in the report. “Given the foundation we laid in the first half of the year, we continue to see growth even after we were added to the entity list. That’s not to say we don’t have difficulties ahead. We do, and they may affect the pace of our growth in the short term.”
Trump signed the order in May, banning the company from doing any work with U.S. companies. In June, the ban was lifted to an extent and the U.S. Commerce Department said it would grant licences to companies that want to do work with Huawei so long as it doesn’t pose a national security threat.
Liang added that the company was “confident in what the future holds,” and intends to keep investing in the future, including a total of CNY 120 billion (about $22.99 billion CAD) in research and development this year.
“We will get through these challenges, and we’re confident that Huawei will enter a new stage of growth after the worst of this is behind us,” he said.
According to its earnings, Huawei indicated that it now has “secured 50 commercial 5G contracts and has shipped more than 150,000 base stations to markets around the world.”
Canada is still reviewing whether or not Huawei will participate in deploying 5G equipment across the country.
Huawei Canada told MobileSyrup that while 5G is important, it “is not everything.”
“First of all, 5G is not everything, but I would say that 5G is important to Huawei,” Chris Pereira, Huawei Canada’s director of public affairs, said. “5G is one of our goals, but we want to be number one in smartphones and enterprise as well. Huawei sets big goals.”
He added that if Huawei was banned from providing 5G equipment it wouldn’t affect the company given it will still be able to provide 3G and 4G LTE equipment as well as grow its enterprise business.
Source: Huawei
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