Facing global isolation and stiff US sanctions, Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd is set to witness a shrink in revenues by over 30% in 2021. According to an internal company report, with things looking grimmer with a recent spike in the number of Covid-19 cases worldwide, revenue might take a further beating in the New Year.
As per estimates, total 2021 revenue is expected to be 634 billion yuan ($99.48 billion), rotating chairman Guo Ping said in a New Year letter to employees on Friday.
The US sanctions have hit Huawei hard and the company has warned that it will see ‘serious challenges’ in 2022 amid ‘politicisation of technology’, and further ‘deglobalisation’.
The Chinese conglomerate is expecting 634 billion yuan ($99.45 billion) in revenue in 2021, a 28.88 dip from 891.4 billion yuan in 2020. In a New Year letter to employees, Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping said that its carrier business had stayed ‘stable’ and its enterprise unit saw growth.
“An unpredictable business environment, the politicisation of technology, and a growing deglobalisation movement all present serious challenges,” Ping said. “Against this backdrop, we need to stick to our strategy and respond rationally to external forces that are beyond our control,” he added.
US President Joe Biden in November signed the law to ban Chinese tech companies like Huawei and ZTE from getting approval for network equipment licences in the country.
Last year, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) designated Huawei and ZTE as national security threats to communications networks — making it harder for US firms to buy equipment from them.
Ping said that Huawei would push ahead with its focus on infrastructure and smart devices, and look to respond more quickly to customer needs with shorter “management chains”. This meant creating “integrated teams” and “domain-specific subsidiaries,” the ZDNet report stated.
According to Ping, Huawei in 2022 would look to streamline its business decision-making processes by giving more autonomy to local offices. He added that Huawei would increase its investment in HarmonyOS and EulerOS.
EulerOS is pitched as Huawei’s infrastructure platform that supports both on-premises and cloud computing services. It runs on Huawei’s version of Linux OS.
HarmonyOS currently supports more than 220 million Huawei devices and there are more than 100 million devices developed by third-party vendors that currently run on HarmonyOS, according to Huawei.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had said: “Once we have determined that Huawei or other gear poses an unacceptable national security risk, it makes no sense to allow that exact same equipment to be purchased and inserted into our communications networks as long as federal dollars are not involved. The presence of these insecure devices in our networks is the threat, not the source of funding used to purchase them.”
