Huawei’s sales increase despite Trump’s blacklisting
BEIJING — A little over two months after Huawei’s chief executive began comparing his embattled company to a bullet-riddled fighter plane, the Chinese tech giant said its sales for January through June grew by nearly a quarter from a year earlier, a sign that the Trump administration’s clampdown has hardly brought the company crashing to the ground.
“Neither production nor shipment has been interrupted, not for one single day,” Liang Hua, chairman of Huawei’s board of directors, said Tuesday at the company’s headquarters in the southern city of Shenzhen. “No matter how many difficulties we might face, we remain confident in the company’s future development.”
Still, Huawei’s troubles with Washington have not left it unscathed. Its smartphone sales outside China plummeted after the Trump administration restricted the company’s access to U.S. technology in May, though Liang said that they had since recovered somewhat.
Revenue for the first half of the year came in at $58 billion. But second-quarter sales grew by less than 13 percent from a year earlier, compared to the 39 percent growth in the first quarter. Huawei did not indicate this in its news conference Tuesday, highlighting only the combined figures for the first half of the year. Because it is not a publicly traded company, it can be selective about which financial results to release.
Liang also warned that the second half of the year might be more challenging than the first.
Huawei’s future has been uncertain since Washington began ratcheting up efforts to undermine the company, saying that its products are dangerously susceptible to influence and disruption by the Chinese government. Huawei rejects the insinuations.
Its fate is now entangled with talks between the United States and China to end their yearlong tariff war. As those negotiations have swung between optimistic highs and gloomy lows, so too has the outlook for Huawei’s business.
After U.S. officials spent months warning the world about the risks of using Huawei’s equipment to build next-generation wireless networks, the Commerce Department took direct aim at the company’s operations in May by putting it on an export blacklist. This meant that American companies like Qualcomm and Intel would need special permission to sell Huawei the microchips and other specialized components that go into its products.
American tech suppliers swiftly halted shipments to Huawei in response.
The Chinese company’s founder and chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, predicted in June that revenue this year would be around $30 billion less than previously forecast. That gap alone represents more revenue than Ericsson, one of Huawei’s main rivals in telecom equipment, took in all year in 2018.