Following a decline in its smartphone business, Chinese tech giant is looking to its other connected devices including laptops and smart TVs to fill the gaps, and believes its wide product portfolio will stand in good stead against its cloud peers such as Alibaba and Tencent.
Huawei Technologies will continue to diversify its product focus as it looks to buffer a decline in its smartphone sales, with its other connected devices including laptops and smart TVs seeing strong growth this past year. The Chinese tech giant also believes its wide product portfolio will stack well against its local peers, such as Alibaba and Tencent–all of which are looking to grow their footprint in the Southeast Asian region. Huawei reported sluggish performance in its recent earnings report, where its annual operating profit fell for the first time in over five years to 72.5 billion yuan ($11.09 billion) in 2020. China also was the only region it saw revenue climb by 15.4% to 585 billion yuan, with all other regions, which included Asia-Pacific, EMEA, and Americas, seeing dips in revenue of between 8.7% and almost 25%. Huawei attributed the loss to a dip in its smartphone sales, which were impacted by ongoing US export sanctions that blocked access to Google’s Android ecosystem. US export bans also cut the Chinese vendor’s access to core chipsets, which Huawei said disrupted its supply chain. It pushed the vendor to diversify its chip suppliers as well as its product focus. At its earnings briefing, Huawei’s rotating chairman Ken Hu said the vendor would look to drive focus on the company’s other connected devices, such as smart TVs, laptops, and smart watches. Pointing to the company’s “1+8+N” strategy, in which “8” referred to its range of connected devices, Hu said revenue from these eight devices had buffered the impact from a dip in its smartphone sales. In fact, its “8+N” business had clocked a 65% year-on-year increase in sales last year, chalking up 891.4 billion yuan ($136.38 billion) in revenue. “N” comprised third-party Internet of Things (IoT) devices that connected via Huawei’s HiLink platform and file-sharing technologies.
