Huawei reported its best sales growth in five years after the Chinese equipment manufacturer said revenue increased by 30 per cent year-on-year to reach CNY175.9 billion (€26 billion/$28.3 billion) for the first six months of this year.
The Financial Times noted that this is the highest recorded rate of expansion for a first-half period since Huawei began reporting half-year revenue in 2011. The company's operating margin was 18 per cent, against 18.3 per cent in the previous year's first half-year period.
CFO Meng Wanzhou attributed the strong performance to stable and healthy growth in all of its three business segments. "We are confident that we will maintain effective growth and steady and healthy development in all business segments in 2015," Meng added.
Huawei claimed that enterprise customers have begun to recognise the Huawei brand for cloud computing, storage, agile network, through to smart city, finance and education. The enterprise business has therefore "started to experience accelerated growth," said Meng.
In the consumer business, Huawei's smartphones have increased in sales, although no specific figures were provided. The company's mid-range and high-end smartphones, the Mate7 and P8 in particular, as well as Honor-branded phones, "have made solid progress" said Meng.
Meanwhile Reuters said it saw an internal memo that indicated Huawei is ahead on smartphone shipments: it is set to meet its 2015 target of 100 million handsets before the end of 2015, according to the memo sent today (Monday) by Huawei's head of the consumer business, Richard Yu. The company has shipped over 10 million smartphones each month since May this year, the memo said.
Huawei recently announced that its Honor brand sold 20 million smartphones in the first half of 2015 and should reach 40 million shipments by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the company's carrier business also continued to perform well, said Meng.
"Investment continued to pour into 4G network construction in China. In addition, the growth in global data traffic drives investment in network capacity expansion, while carriers' digital transformation pushes up investment in the ICT industry," Meng said. "These factors helped us maintain steady growth in the carrier business."
The company only splits out its revenue figures by region in its full-year results, so it's not clear how well its European operations have performed this year to date. However, Huawei has often noted that Europe is a key focus for the company future growth.
In June, for example, Huawei firmly put its backing behind Europe by underlining its partnerships with operators, car manufacturers and others, and placing an emphasis on research and development to help Europe establish a leadership position in future technological developments in business and industry.
At the time, William Xu, chief strategy marketing officer at the vendor, commented: "Europe is one of most important markets for Huawei outside China."
Xu added that Europe "is at the frontier" of its innovation work and collaboration with partners. The company has already established 19 joint innovation centres with its partners in the region, as well as 18 of its own R&D centres in eight countries.
For more:
- see this Huawei release
- see this Reuters article
- see this Reuters article on smartphone shipments
- see this Financial Times article (sub. req.)
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