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.
Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), founder and CEO of US-based artificial intelligence chip designer Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Friday celebrated the first Nvidia Blackwell wafer produced on US soil. Huang visited TSMC’s advanced wafer fab in the US state of Arizona and joined the Taiwanese chipmaker’s executives to witness the efforts to “build the infrastructure that powers the world’s AI factories, right here in America,” Nvidia said in a statement. At the event, Huang joined Y.L. Wang (王英郎), vice president of operations at TSMC, in signing their names on the Blackwell wafer to
France cannot afford to ignore the third credit-rating reduction in less than a year, French Minister of Finance Roland Lescure said. “Three agencies have downgraded us and we can’t ignore this cloud,” he told Franceinfo on Saturday, speaking just hours after S&P lowered his country’s credit rating to “A+” from “AA-” in an unscheduled move. “Fundamentally, it’s an additional cloud to a weather forecast that was already pretty gray. It’s a call for lucidity and responsibility,” he said, adding that this is “a call to be serious.” The credit assessor’s move means France has lost its double-A rating at two of the
AI BOOST: Although Taiwan’s reliance on Chinese rare earth elements is limited, it could face indirect impacts from supply issues and price volatility, an economist said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s economic growth this year to 5.6 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports and investment linked to artificial intelligence (AI), as it said that the current momentum could peak soon. The acceleration of the global AI race has fueled a surge in Taiwan’s AI-related capital spending and exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products, which have been key drivers of growth this year. “We have revised our GDP forecast for Taiwan upward to 5.6 percent from 4 percent, an upgrade that mainly reflects stronger-than-expected AI-related exports and investment in the third
RARE EARTHS: The call between the US Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart came as Washington sought to rally G7 partners in response to China’s export controls China and the US on Saturday agreed to conduct another round of trade negotiations in the coming week, as the world’s two biggest economies seek to avoid another damaging tit-for-tat tariff battle. Beijing last week announced sweeping controls on the critical rare earths industry, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten 100 percent tariffs on imports from China in retaliation. Trump had also threatened to cancel his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea later this month on the sidelines of the APEC summit. In the latest indication of efforts to resolve their dispute, Chinese state media reported that
RSS