Huawei Technologies Co (華為) posted its first quarterly net loss in years after the company spent aggressively on research in areas from electric vehicles (EVs) to chips while the business as a whole slowed.
The Shenzhen-based networking and electronics leader reported a 9.5 percent annual rise in revenue to about 276 billion yuan (US$38.1 billion) in the December quarter last year, according to Bloomberg’s calculations based on annual results.
Huawei took a big step forward in chipmaking and smartphones last year, when it debuted its own fully in-house operating system and began to compete with Nvidia Corp domestically on artificial intelligence (AI) server chips.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Hit by a series of US sanctions, Huawei spent heavily on research and development (R&D).
The company posted a net loss of about 300 million yuan for the December quarter of last year, compared with a net profit of 13.9 billion yuan a year previously when the company recorded gains from previous asset sales.
Overall, the company made a net profit of 62.6 billion yuan last year, down 28 percent from 87 billion yuan in 2023.
A Huawei spokesperson in a statement said that profit slipped last year because it “continued to increase... future-oriented investment and there were no gains from the sale of businesses.”
Huawei said it plowed 179.7 billion yuan into R&D last year, up 9.1 percent from 2023 and about one-fifth of overall revenue.
Revenue last year rose 22 percent year-on-year to 862.1 billion yuan, the highest since the figure surpassed 890 billion yuan in 2020.
Most of that came from its information and communication technology infrastructure business and consumer products — which encompass handsets, wearables and laptops — followed by cloud computing and telecom business.
The results were “in line with forecast,” Huawei’s rotating chairwoman Sabrina Meng (孟晚舟) said in a statement.
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