China’s Huawei Technologies charted its fastest growth in four years in 2023, with a sharp jump in net profits and a rebound in its smartphone business.
Huawei’s net profit jumped 144.5% to 87 billion yuan ($12.5 billion) for the year, with the net profit margin more than doubling on a year earlier to 12.35%.
Some of the profits came from ongoing payment from the sale of the Honor smartphone brand, which Huawei sold in November 2020, a company spokesperson said.
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Meanwhile, revenue rose 9.63% from a year earlier to 704.2 billion yuan ($97.48 billion), in line with company projections in December last year.
That was Huawei’s fastest revenue growth since 2019, when Washington cut off its access to US technology anywhere in the world.
Last year also marked the third consecutive year of growth for the company. Huawei’s revenue plummeted by almost a third in 2021, when it started to exhaust its chip reserves.
Its revenue remains below its 2020 peak of 891.3 billion yuan.
The consumer business contributed most to Huawei’s 2023 revenues, growing 17.3% to 251.49 billion yuan. While the company did not break down the consumer figure, the segment includes its handset business, which saw a renaissance last year.
Huawei surprised the world with the launch of its new Mate60 series in August last year. The smartphones were powered by China’s first homegrown 7nm chips, at a time when US export controls cut off Chinese tech players from advanced semiconductors.
Huawei has previously said it will continue to expand its device business in 2024.
Cloud, smart car businesses see strong growth
Huawei remained relatively muted about its achievement, doing away with the press conference and launch event it has held every year at least since the US restrictions began.
“We’ve been through a lot over the past few years. But through one challenge after another, we’ve managed to grow,” rotating chairman Ken Hu said in a press release.
In August 2022, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei informed his employees that the company was simply targeting “survival”. But a year of drastic developments, including the Mate 60 phones and its Nvidia-rivalling Ascend AI chips have helped Huawei chart a quick recovery.
The company is also a major beneficiary of the Xi Jinping government’s push to remove and replace foreign-made technologies and softwares in critical industries. Huawei’s HarmonyOS is on track to overtake Apple’s iOS as the most used operating system in China this year.
Huawei’s cloud business has also grown by more than a fifth over the year, generating revenue of 55.3 billion yuan.
Huawei’s four-year-old smart car software and components business also saw major growth albeit from a lower comparison base, up 128.1% year on year to 4.7 billion yuan.
Last year Huawei announced it would spin off the smart car unit into a new $35 billion company.
Earlier this month, Richard Yu, the managing director and chairman of Huawei’s smart car solutions, announced the unit would likely turn a profit from April after losing billions of yuan in the past year, local media reported.
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- Reuters, with additional inputs from Vishakha Saxena
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