Huawei is portraying 2023 as a year for celebration, claiming the company is back to business as usual despite geopolitical challenges. However, sales remain significantly below what they were before the economic sanctions.

According to Ken Hu, one of the company’s three directors, Huawei is doing well. In an overview of 2023, he points out that business at Huawei is back to normal. In the previous year, sales of 700 billion RMB (89.5 billion euros) would have been generated. These are good numbers, but in practice sales are still around 22 percent lower than in 2020. Before the American embargo rules, Huawei collected 891 billion RMB.

Hu points to a variety of Asian activities that support Huawei’s sales. In the East, the company remains a leading player in the telecommunications infrastructure market. Due to the sanctions and the associated perception, this is no longer the case in Europe: 5G networks are being built by Huawei’s competitors almost everywhere in the West.

ICT ambitions

Despite all this, Hu expects renewed growth in Europe. The storage operation must be committed to this. We have to wait and see to what extent Huawei can realize these ambitions. In any case, the Chinese technology giant wants to increasingly move away from Western technology that is subject to embargo rules. An example of this is the company’s own Hongmeng OS, which offers an alternative to Android.

Hu points to the uncertain economic and geopolitical situation that remains a challenge. The sanctions and embargo rules also have an impact. Despite these sanctions, Huawei wants to focus on its ICT infrastructure business with computers, storage, networks and more until 2024. To do this, the company will again have to deal primarily with Chinese hardware.