If you were ever to look for a more solid proof, of how consumer hardware has become the driving force behind the hardware industry’s chunk of revenues, it is this. Huawei, a company best known for manufacturing and selling telecom infra for most of the years that it has been in existence, has reported $8.8bn in profit for the year 2018. The catch ? Its consumer hardware business — smartphones and related gadgetry stuff — has taken over its core telecom business by a decent margin.
Huawei isn’t a listed company though. However, it does report its earnings, which are audited by global audit major KPMG.
In the most recent of such reports for the year 2018, Huawei reported an Overall revenue of 721 billion CNY, or $107.4 billion, which represented a 19.5 increase year-on-year. The company made $8.8bn in profits from that. And as already mentioned, it was the consumer business this time that resulted in the massive revenue splurge.
The company reported 324 billion CNY in revenues from its consumer business, which was up by a massive 45.1% compared with previous year. This was driven largely by its P30 series of extremely popular smartphones and the overall growth in other handsets as well. The corresponding figure for its carrier business stood at 294 billion CNY, down by just over 1% compared with previous year. Rest of the revenue, 74 billion CNY, came in from its enterprise business. The chart below sums up all of the above numbers.
In terms of regional share of revenues, China expectedly was the source of more than half of the company’s revenues. This was followed by EMEA, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. Americas lagging behind is perhaps due to the allegations of Huawei being a source of Chinese spying, levied by the current US administration under Donald Trump.
In terms of highlights for the year, Huawei launched the industry’s first full range of 5G end-to-end commercial products and solutions that comply with 3GPP standards. In addition, the company famously conducted 5G tests with 182 carriers worldwide, signed more than 30 commercial contracts for 5G, and shipped more than 40,000 5G base stations to markets around the world. In the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, Huawei rolled out 53 NB-IoT networks and 16 eMTC networks, supporting millions of connections.
