The Chinese telecom giant Huawei announced a record profit for 2021.
The Chinese telecom giant, Huawei, has generated a net profit of $17.8 billion, representing CFA10. 633 billion with a net margin of 17.9 percent, said Monday Mr. Karl Song, the Vice President of the group.
Mr. Karl Song presented to journalists the overall performance of the group for the year 2021, by video conference from China.
He noted at the beginning of his remarks that the turnover in 2021 reached $99.9 billion (CFA 59, 649 billion).
“We ended the year in a strong financial position, and as a whole, our performance was in line with expectations,” he said, adding that “in 2021, Huawei generated a net profit of $17.8 billion with a net margin of 17.9 percent.”
Meanwhile, cash flow from operating activities increased by 69.4 percent allowing the group to have a sufficient amount of liquidity. In addition, the debt to equity ratio has been reduced from 62.3 percent in 2020 to 57.8 percent in 2021, further improving its financial structure.
“By streamlining management and fully utilizing digital technology, we have made steady improvements in operational efficiency to generate more revenue and increase soil fertility,” he stressed.
The multinational’s operator-related business remained stable in 2021. The group, in its strategy, has worked with operators and partners around the world to advance more than 3,000 industrial 5G applications and has delivered best-in-class 5G experiences in 13 countries, including Switzerland, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.
“Our enterprise-related activities have grown steadily and we have launched 11 scenario-based solutions for key sectors such as transportation, finance and energy,” he added.
The group has also established several integrated teams, including a coal mining team, a smart roads team and a customs and ports team, he further said.
As for the consumer business, it has been rapidly expanding into new areas, which has helped the Chinese company record steady growth in sales of smart accessories, smart displays and Huawei Mobile Services during the year.
Its “HarmonyOS” technology has been installed on more than 220 million Huawei handsets and has attracted 1,900 ecosystem partners.
As a result, Huawei ranked 9th on Brand Finance’s list of the ten most valuable brands in the world in 2022.
Sharing the group’s future development strategy, Song assured that the tougher the situation, the more the company invests in the future.
The multinational company has increased its R&D (Research & development) investment in 2021 to $22.4 billion, or 22.4 percent of total sales.
“Our R&D spending and R&D spending ratio both reached a 10-year high in 2021, and Huawei ranked second in the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scorecard in 2021 (Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Samsung, Apple and Facebook),” he went on to say.
Total R&D investments over the past decade amount to more than $132.5 billion. In the future, the group wants to continue to invest heavily in R&D to strengthen its innovation.
The multinational plans to drive innovation in systems engineering and lead fundamental changes in three areas: fundamental theories, architecture and software.
First, it wants to rethink fundamental theories, continue to explore theories and technologies related to next-generation MIMO and wireless AI to get ever closer to the limit of Shannon’s theorem.
“For example, our innovative new Massive MIMO product, the MetaAAU, is capable of reducing power consumption by 30 percent while increasing coverage. Second, we are redesigning the architecture,” he added.
Second, “our new calculation model is an example: it will increase data processing capacity by three orders of magnitude to cope with the massive data generated in the digital age,” he concluded.
“Third, we are reinventing software. We have streamlined our technology systems for core software, and we aim to maximize the computational potential of diversified hardware with HarmonyOS and openEuler,” he declared.
Now, with its “MindSpore” framework, the Chinese multinational is also helping scientists and engineers significantly improve efficiency in the development field.
In response to a question about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Mr. Song said that “like all multinationals operating around the world, we are faced with a challenge,” especially the U.S. and Western sanctions that have “direct and indirect impacts.”
AP/ls/fss/as/APA