America’s assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring
Siemens and Honeywell. The consumer division, which generates a third of sales, makes all manner of devices that can connect with 5G. It has begun releasing fancy smartphones again, but also makes watches, televisions and the systems that control many Chinese electric vehicles (evs).
Revenue from consumer devices grew by about 17% in 2023, thanks mainly to the new smartphones. A cloud-computing unit accounts for almost a tenth of revenues. Its sales grew by 22% last year.
As Microsoft shrinks its operations in China, owing to American tech sanctions, Huawei is said to be scooping up its engineers. Another fast-growing unit focuses on energy, including EV charging networks and photovoltaic inverters, which turn the direct current produced by solar panels into the alternating sort that flows through the grid. It is not that American sanctions have had no impact at all on Huawei—far from it.
Its business has become more concentrated in China, for one thing, with foreign sales now only a third of the total, down from half in 2017. It has also been forced to focus more on innovation, to find technological fixes for its political problems. Some 114,000 employees, more than half the total, work in R&D.
Most striking of all, it has become more vertically integrated, as it seeks to develop replacements in-house for components or software snatched away by Uncle Sam. To survive existing and potential future American sanctions, Huawei has been systematically seeking substitutes for American intellectual property (IP) in its products and internal systems. Mr Ren claims the firm has replaced 13,000 foreign-made parts with Chinese ones.
Read more on livemint.com
