Huawei has unveiled its turnover for 2019 and confirms an increase in phone sales over the whole year. The latter increase by 18% compared to the previous year. The number of mobiles sold has increased by 20%. But the firm expects a difficult 2020 year.
A year ago, all studies claimed that Huawei would overtake Samsung in 2020 at the latest. Today, no analyst will have this opinion. The Chinese firm has been undergoing an embargo on the part of the United States since the end of April. Huawei can no longer buy technologies from the United States. Whether components of Qualcomm or Intel or software from Google. The Google Play Services suite is also affected.
This means that recent smartphones from Huawei do not incorporate any proprietary technology from the Mountain View company. One of the most symbolic victims of this is the Mate 30 Pro. Huawei continues to use Android (and more specifically its open-source version) to animate its devices.
But the objective of the Chinese firm is to offer an alternative to Google software. And this as quickly as possible. The development of this suite, called Huawei Mobile Services, is one of the main challenges of the year 2020. Another challenge is to maintain growth in revenue and sales. But Huawei expects 2020 to be more difficult than 2019.
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In a message to employees of the firm, Eric Xu, one of the co-chairs of Huawei, released some figures for the year 2019. The revenue of Huawei would have reached 850 billion yuan ($121.72 billion), an increase of 18% compared to 2018. This figure is slightly below the firm’s forecasts.
20% more Huawei smartphones sold in 2019
Huawei’s growth in 2019 is also slightly below the growth observed in 2018 (+19.5%). According to Reuters, a majority of Huawei’s turnover in 2019 is concentrated in the first half, when the embargo had not yet been decided.
Huawei would have marketed 240 million smartphones in 2019, representing a growth of 20% compared to 2018. Recall that most of this growth is driven by the Chinese market which strongly supports its international champion. Recently, we reported that the company has distributed 12 million Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro worldwide.
In his message, Eric Xu confirms that the forecasts for 2020 are, for the moment, not as pleasing. Even though the United States has started to issue commercial licenses for certain American companies ( such as Microsoft, for example ) to resume their business with Huawei, the blocking of Android seems to be the biggest obstacle to growth. Because, as long as Huawei has not circumvented this problem to offer an experience identical to that proposed previously, selling mobiles in the West will certainly be very complicated.
