In an internal New Year’s message to employees on Friday, Huawei Rotating Chairman Guo Ping said the Chinese tech giant expects to post $99 billion USD in revenue for 2021, down 28.9% year-over-year from 2020 — reports CNBC.
While Guo’s message did not cite reasons for the steep drop in revenue, it is pretty evident that the Trump-era U.S. sanctions on Huawei that haven’t eased up yet, the ongoing global ship shortage, increased competition on Huawei’s home turf, and petering demand for smartphones all have something to do with it.
Huawei’s Rotating Chairman did note that the company has faced “serious challenges” this year from “an unpredictable business environment, the politicization of technology, and a growing deglobalization movement,” according to an English-language version of his message.
Guo added that “this past year, our carrier business remained stable, our enterprise business experienced solid growth, and our device business expanded swiftly into new business domains,” encouraging employees to rally for the upcoming year.
Huawei has taken hit after hit this year, in everything from smartphone sales to participating in developing 5G networks in the West.
For 2022, Guo said the company will ramp up efforts to attract and develop talent, and also focus more on automotive-related technologies. Last week, Tesla North reported that the first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle with Huawei’s HarmonyOS Operating System onboard is set to start deliveries around February 20.
In addition, the Chinese tech giant has plans to work around U.S. sanctions and make a comeback in the smartphone space by licensing handset designs out to third parties for access to critical components.
2021 wasn’t all bad for the company, though — Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who had been fighting an almost three-year-long legal battle against extradition in Canada after she was arrested at the Vancouver International Airport in December 2018, struck a deal with the U.S. to drop the fraud charges against her in September and has since returned back to China.
Canada has still yet to decide whether or not to ban Huawei from 5G networks despite its allies already doing so, as the federal government continues to drag its feet on the national security matter.
