Huawei Technologies Co (華為), China’s largest maker of telephone equipment, said revenue exceeded US$32 billion last year, narrowing its gap behind Ericsson AB.
Revenue grew about 11 percent last year, William Xu (徐文偉), a Huawei board member and president in charge of its enterprise division, said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, citing preliminary figures. The Shenzhen-based company also met its profit targets, helped by sales of mobile devices and growth at the enterprise business, he said.
Huawei’s revenue was about 50 percent more than France’s Alcatel Lucent, which sells fewer products than Huawei. Stockholm-based Ericsson, the biggest maker of wireless network equipment, reported sales last year of 227 billion kronor (US$34.5 billion).
Chief executive officer Ren Zhengfei (任正非) is adding cloud computing and business computing services as well as sales of smartphones and tablets as Huawei works on a goal of generating US$100 billion in sales.
“The networks are converging, from the terminal to the infrastructure, supported by cloud computing and applications,” Xu said in the interview on Tuesday.
“Huawei in the future could be one of the leading companies” in the field of information and telecommunications systems, he said.
Growth at Huawei Enterprise may be slower than originally anticipated, Xu said, adding that US$15 billion in contract revenue by 2015 is a more realistic target.
Leon He, another Huawei executive, in May last year gave a sales projection of US$15 billion to US$20 billion for the division.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts