Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/21/huawei_first_half_year_14/

Huawei's turnover rockets upwards. Suck on that, US government

Sales boom by nearly a fifth despite US and Aussie regimes' spy fear boycott

By Paul Kunert

Posted in On-Prem, 21st July 2014 14:07 GMT

Execs at Chinese hardware maker Huawei are laughing all the way to the bank after reporting a healthy bounce in revenues and margins, despite being effectively blockaded by some governments in the West.

The maker of telco kit, smartphones and enterprise networking gear today said that turnover for the first half of calendar '14 was up 19 per cent to 135.8bn yuan (£12.8bn).

Margins hardened too, moving up from from 18.3 per cent for the corresponding period a year ago to 19 per cent, but the exact profit made was not disclosed by the organisation.

The numbers were fuelled by "increasing investments in LTE networks worldwide," said Cathy Meng, CFO at Huawei. "Rapid growth in software and services helped maintain steady growth in our network carrier business".

The FusionSphere hypervisor, which has hundreds of reference sites in larger emerging economies, recently sneaked into Gartner's Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualisation Infrastructure.

In terms of the smartphone biz, Huawei flogged 13.7 million units in Q1, placing it behind Apple and Samsung as the largest shifters of such devices on the planet.

Meng added Huawei's work rate in the enterprise market has also "begun to pay off" as better brand recognition was helping business to lift off in the consumer market. Here the company is still way behind networking biggies Cisco and HP, holding around mid-single digit percentage share of sales.

Huawei is aiming to become a $70bn tech monster by 2018 and the numbers outlined today mean it is on track to meet this target, in spite of the best efforts of the Australian and US governments.

The US regime all but banned Huawei in 2012 after growing suspicious that its routers contain leaky backdoors. Last year they were joined by the Aussies who prevented the firm from supplying kit to fire up that country's National Broadband Network project.

Ironically, proof of spying attempts that actually came to light involved the US trying to access the company's source code to install its own backdoors. Since then, officials in Beijing have initiated a brand new vetting process for suppliers.

Of course, Huawei has always denied that it was up to no good, saying to be caught in the act would be tantamount commercial suicide.

The firm could well start plying its trade in the US more heavily in the not-too-distant future, according to a prestigious US think tank. ®