Huawei touts growth amid U.S.-led pressure campaign

BEIJING — Huawei Technologies, the Chinese tech giant, looks set to record strong growth again this year despite U.S. efforts to shut it out of international markets because of security concerns.

The Shenzhen-based company has steadily ramped up the smartphone side of its business, an area that is much harder for the Trump administration to hobble, but it has also apparently managed to double the number of contracts it has won for 5G technology.

“They are on track to do far better than in 2017 or 2018,” Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting in Beijing, said after reviewing Huawei’s latest financial report.

“As long as they can continue to grow their consumer business and continue to convince operators outside the U.S. that their equipment is safe and high-quality and cost-effective, they will keep recording strong results,” he said.

Huawei, which is not a publicly listed company and thus is not required to publish its accounts, releases a selection of figures each quarter in an gesture toward transparency. However, the figures are not audited and are not complete.

In Wednesday’s release of third-quarter figures, the company did not give standalone numbers for the threemonth period but instead rolled them in with figures from the first half of the year, making it difficult to discern quarterly trends.

The figures showed that Huawei’s revenue was 24.4% higher in the nine months ending with September than they were in the same period last year, growing to $86 billion. Given that the company reported revenue growth of 39% in the first three months, this suggests that earnings have slowed sharply over the course of this year.

Still, Huawei appears to be faring better than in the past two years, when it recorded 16% revenue growth for 2017 and 20% last year.

This performance comes despite Washington’s global campaign to stop governments and telecommunications companies from buying Huawei’s next-generation equipment, citing concerns that it could be used by the Chinese government to collect intelligence and otherwise conduct surveillance.

Founded in 1987 by former People’s Liberation Army engineer Ren Zhengfei, Huawei has grown into a corporate behemoth that exemplifies the Communist Party’s vision for the country’s future: advanced high tech and entirely Chinese.

But its emergence has been met with growing suspicions about its links to the ruling party and whether the company might be acting on the party’s behalf.

The Trump administration has been trying to shut Huawei out of its telecommunications market and convince other governments around the world to do the same.