By Pascal Oparada
Social Media/Tech Reporter
The Chinese tech giant, Huawei has announced an $8.8billion profit in 2018, despite its ongoing rift with the United States government which arrested its Chief Finance Office and daughter of its founder, Meng Wenzhou over money laundering charges in Canada.
Although Huawei is not a publicly quoted company, its records are audited by KPMG. Analysts believe that the big takeaway from its financial records is that it has become a hardware company. It means that revenue from consumer devices overtook its core telecom business, involving selling networking gears to carriers.
Overall revenue for 2018 was 721 billion Chinese Yen (CNY), or $107.4 billion, which represented a 19.5 increase year-on-year.
Huawei said revenue from its consumer business rose by 45 per cent to reach 349 billion Chinese Yen (CNY) ($52 billion), with its carrier business dropping 1.3 per cent to 294 billion CNY, or $43.8 billion. Enterprise services are the third revenue bucket, and that accounted for the remaining 74.4 billion CNY.
The company is, unsurprisingly, still dependent on China, which accounted for 52 per cent of its revenue in 2018 although Huawei saw stronger growth from other global markets. Its business in the Americas, however, lags that of Europe and The Middle East and the Asia Pacific in terms of revenue, and that isn’t likely to change soon.