Huawei keeps the sales coming despite US difficulties

Huawei claims it achieved stable and continuous growth across all its telecoms markets last year with carrier network, enterprise and consumer all increasing sales and contributing to hefty year-on-year revenue growth overall. But the big earner in 2013 wasn’t carrier gear, which grew by a so-so 4 per cent to €19.4 billion, but its smaller enterprise and consumer segments which put on a sales spurt that any other vendor would have been ecstatic to win.

Enterprise sales were up by 32.4 per cent to €1.75 billion and consumer was up by 17 per cent to €6.7 billion.

While the Chinese market looks like a mouth-watering opportunity for any telecoms vendor outside looking in, the non-China world has been an equally lucrative option for Huawei, which earned 65 per cent of its revenue from non-Chinese sales last year, despite its difficulties in the US market where it’s been accused of spying on behalf of the Chinese government.

Obviously Huawei strenuously denies the accusations, but there’s no doubt that it’s had a none-too-helpful impact on Huawei’s commercial activities in the US. So much so that the CEO of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, told an interviewer that the company was sick of being ‘in the middle’ of US-China relations and had decided to exit the US market. That position has since been clarified with a statement pledging continuing commitment to customers etc etc.

Overall, however, the growth WAS in China where Huawei boosted sales by 14.4 per cent.