China technology giant Huawei says it is no longer in “crisis mode” after years of U.S. restrictions that limited its overseas sales.
“U.S. restrictions are now our new normal, and we're back to business as usual,'' Eric Xu, Huawei's current chairman, said in a statement released Friday.
The firm’s sunny outlook comes as the company also revealed that its 2022 U.S. revenue of $91.6 billion was almost the same as last year’s bottom line.
Li Chengdong, a Beijing-based electronics industry analyst and founder of Dolphin Think Tank, told VOA’s Mandarine Service Huawei believes it has a lot of experience in surviving the crisis and continuing to grow. Therefore, it is still optimistic about the prospects and is also actively deploying new businesses.
"They (Huawei executives) believe that every time Huawei has a crisis, the combat effectiveness of the entire team will increase,” Li Chengdong said. “It will readjust the entire team structure and find new fronts, so it has laid out a lot of service industries, that is, cloud (service), that is, 5G technology is applied to different scenarios, such as smart cars and smart ports, to expand this new opportunity.”
Huawei, China’s first global tech brand, suffered a blow in 2019 when then-U.S. President Donald Trump blocked the company’s access to U.S. processor chips and other technology on the grounds that the company was facilitating Chinese spying.
Huawei has denied the allegations.
In his statement, Xu said the firm's telecommunications network business maintained “steady growth'' and that a decline in its mobile devices sector had diminished. He also touted what he called Huawei’s “rapid growth'' in its cloud business and promised to maintain Huawei's heavy investment in research and development and said that its cloud business needs to become the ``foundation'' in driving growth.
Xu’s only mention of the coronavirus and its effects on the business came when he thanked the “frontline staff outside of China – those who have held the fort to serve our customers despite the adverse impacts of COVID-19.” He made no mention, however, of the current relaxing of COVID restrictions in China or the surge in cases the country is now experiencing.
VOA’s Mandarine Service contributed to this report. Some information for this report also came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
