- Despite Western sanctions, the Chinese vendor reported a 22% year-over-year increase in revenue
- Huawei stressed its commitment to R&D, where more than 50% of its workforce is employed
- The company vows to continue its “Succeed Through Quality” approach through 2025
What U.S. equipment ban? Chinese telecom giant Huawei appears to be doing just fine after a few years in survival mode, reporting its 2024 performance in line with forecasts, generating $8.6 billion in net profit.
Granted, its net profit was 28% lower than the year prior, mainly due to two factors: “We continued to increase our future-oriented investment and there were no gains from the sale of businesses,” the company said in a statement.
That’s probably referring to Huawei’s heavy investment in R&D and the fact that it didn’t see the type of income it saw the year prior when the sale of its Honor handset unit gave it an earnings boost.
It’s a different story in the revenue realm, where the telecom giant’s 2024 revenue jumped to $118.2 billion, a 22% year-over-year increase. That doesn’t match its peak $122.4 billion revenue in 2020, but it’s certainly moving in the right direction.
Huawei’s momentum isn’t too surprising to anyone who’s been watching the telecom sector. Even with a dwindling global telecom equipment market, Huawei consistently wins the day, grabbing 31% of the overall equipment revenue in 2024, according to Dell’Oro Group.
Meanwhile, the Chinese telecom giant continues to invest big in R&D. In 2024, its total R&D spending reached $24.7 billion, representing 20% of its total revenue, ending the year with more than half of its workforce, or 113,000 people, working in R&D.
How Huawei is gaining revenue
While Western sanctions have cut into Huawei’s business, the company has been diversifying, seizing new opportunities in AI, cloud and automotive solutions. But its two biggest revenue-generating businesses remain ICT infrastructure, which includes its 5G carrier equipment, and consumer, which comprises its Harmony OS ecosystem.
“In 2024, the entire team at Huawei banded together to tackle a wide range of external challenges, while further improving product quality, operations quality, and operational efficiency. Our performance was in line with forecast,” said Sabrina Meng, Huawei's rotating chairwoman, in a statement Monday.
“In 2025, Huawei will continue to apply its 'Succeed Through Quality' approach to all management systems and business activities. The company is firmly committed to its quality goals and will keep honing quality as a competitive edge,” Meng added.
5G Advanced for the win
Huawei noted that 2024 marked the first year of commercial 5.5G, or 5G Advanced, and the advanced technology has been introduced in more than 200 cities around the world.
Without naming the carrier, Huawei said it worked with an operator in Europe to update its brand by offering differentiated 5G connectivity for more reliable game acceleration and livestreaming media services. The offerings led to an estimated 10% increase in high-end users and revenue growth for the carrier, according to Huawei.
The U.S. effectively banned Huawei and ZTE from U.S. telecom networks when in 2019 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted unanimously to ban the use of Universal Service Fund (USF) dollars to purchase telecom equipment and services from vendors that pose risks to national security, specifically China’s Huawei and ZTE.
That led to a years-long endeavor to remove existing Huawei and ZTE gear in U.S. networks, primarily in rural areas, but those efforts were stymied by lack of funds. Late last year, Congress passed a large defense bill that includes full funding for the initiative, aka the “rip and replace” program, as well as the means to pay for it via an AWS-3 auction to occur before June 2026.