Huawei recently published its Annual Report for 2019, which details how the company's various businesses performed last year. The report sheds light on Huawei's mobile business and how it performed despite the harsh sanctions imposed on the company by the Trump administration. Separate reports from earlier this year have already revealed that the brand managed to do quite well irrespective of the trade ban, overtaking Apple to take the second spot as the largest smartphone brand and managing to sell more 5G smartphones than its Korean competitor Samsung. Here are the highlights from the latest report released by the company:

Huawei's consumer business managed to generate a revenue of CNY 467,304 million (~$66 billion) in 2019, marking a 34% increase YoY. The company's monthly active user base surpassed 600 million worldwide. Last year, the company kickstarted its "1+8+N" strategy, where "1" represents mobile phones, "8" represents tablets, PCs, VR devices, wearables, smart screens, smart audio, and head units, and "N" represents IoT devices. Thanks to this new strategy, Huawei managed to ship more than 240 million Huawei and Honor-branded smartphones, marking a 16% YoY growth. Out of the total shipments, 6.9 million devices were 5G-enabled.

Citing reports from IDC and Strategy Analytics, Huawei also revealed that the company and its sub-brand Honor managed to capture 17.6% of the global smartphone market, making it the second-biggest smartphone brand in the world. The company shipped over 44 million Mate and P series devices in 2019, a 53% YoY growth over 2018. Shipments of its flagship Huawei P30 series exceeded 20 million units within 8 months of launch. Huawei's PC segment also saw tremendous growth and its PC shipments grew 200% YoY. However, the company did not share how many units were shipped in 2019.

In the tablet segment, Huawei revealed that its shipments continued to grow despite an overall decline in the tablet market. Citing a report from IDC, the company claimed that its tablet market share in China overtook that of Apple in Q3 and Q4 of 2019. Huawei's wearables and smart audio products also saw significant growth, with 170% and more than 200% YoY growth respectively. Huawei credits this growth to the strong sales of its Watch GT 2 and FreeBuds 3.

Following the trade sanctions, the company launched Huawei Mobile services last year — a replacement for Google Mobile Services. The company claims that HMS already has over 400 million monthly active users, with over 55,000 apps integration with HMS Core. Its AppGallery, which is an alternative to the Google Play Store, is available in over 170 countries and has already surpassed 210 billion app downloads. To promote its services, the company claims that it held 45 Huawei Developer Day events in 32 countries and regions over last year and managed to register over 1.3 million developers. On top of that, the company has also increased its Shining-Star Program incentives from CNY 1 billion (~$142million) to US$1 billion and expanded the program to global developers. The program helps developers create apps through the entire creation process.

As far as device security is concerned, Huawei says that it developed an in-house microkernel Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which first made an appearance on the Huawei Mate 30 series. The TEE is used for storing users' biometric data and passwords, and for performing operations like fingerprint verification, facial recognition, and password confirmation. Huawei added that its TEE has received EAL5+ certification. And finally, the report also talks about the company's growth in offline retail, highlighting that it has over 65,000 retail stores, display zones and display counters worldwide, and over 6000 experience stores. To provide users with effective after-sales support, Huawei has also established over 2600 offline service centers in 105 countries and regions.

Even though Huawei reported significant growth across all verticals, everything hasn't been hunky-dory for the company. The US trade ban has obviously had a severe effect on its business, with reports from CNBC revealing that Huawei saw a $12 billion shortfall in revenue due to the blacklisting. In a bid to curtail any further losses, the company is now hoping that Google will place its apps in Huawei's AppGallery to bolster the performance of its service.


Source: Huawei