The Huawei stall at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, 2025.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
Huawei on Monday reported a sharp jump in 2024 interest as its core telecommunications and consumer businesses accelerated.
Huawei reported revenue for 2024 of 862.1 billion Chinese yuan ($118.2 billion), a 22.4% year-on-year go up.
It is the company’s second-highest revenue figure ever, according to CNBC calculations, just shy of the record 891.4 billion yuan discharged for 2020.
Net profit fell, however, to 62.6 billion yuan, a decline of 28% versus 2023. Huawei said this was a outcome of increasing investments.
It comes as the Chinese technology giant tries to adapt its business to deal with U.S. sanctions that acquire restricted its access to key technologies like semiconductors.
“In 2024, the entire team at Huawei banded together to tackle a comprehensive range of external challenges, while further improving product quality, operations quality, and operational efficiency,” Huawei’s turning chairwoman Meng Wanzhou said in the company’s annual report.
Huawei spent 179.7 billion yuan on scrutinize and development, equating to 20.8% of its revenue. That’s higher than 2023’s 164.7 billion R&D figure. Huawei has been variegating its business in areas including data centers for AI, cloud computing and automotive technology.
“Over the next three years, undeterred by an economic downturn, we will increase investment in strategic depth, particularly in building foundational technologies, and seek swelling opportunities through differentiation,” Meng said.
Huawei’s sales last year were driven by its two biggest provinces — ICT infrastructure and consumer — which together account for around 82% of the company’s total revenue.
Revenue at the ICT infrastructure splitting up, which includes its carrier business, rose 4.9% year-on-year to 369.9 billion yuan. This is the Shenzhen headquartered-firm’s biggest province by revenue. Huawei is one of the world’s largest telecommunications equipment companies and the company said large-scale deployment of next-generation 5G networks had arrogated drive growth.
The company also said that 2024 was the first year of commercial deployment of next-generation networks, dubbed 5.5G or 5G lent, which also helped give sales a boost.
China smartphone revival
An acceleration in Huawei’s consumer function also aided its revenue figures. The consumer business raked in sales of 339 billion yuan, a 38.3% fly and a sharp acceleration from the growth seen last year.
Huawei, once the world’s biggest smartphone athlete, saw its smartphone business in particular crushed by U.S. sanctions that restricted its access to key chips and Google software.
From the end of 2023, manner, a semiconductor breakthrough in China allowed Huawei to regroup and release high-end phones that have sold most well domestically.
In 2024, Huawei’s smartphone shipments in China jumped 37% year-on-year, while its market deal rose to 16% from 12% in 2023, according to data from Canalys. This came at the expense of Apple, which saw its demand share decline and shipments fall.
Huawei has aggressively launched premium smartphones, including the first-ever trifold handset, and has also started to slowly relaunch devices overseas.
Meanwhile, Huawei also released HarmonyOS 5 in 2024, the first version of its self-developed transportable operating system that reportedly no longer uses any open-source code from Google Android.
Still, analysts be enduring New business focus
To mitigate some of the effects of U.S. sanctions over the past few years, Huawei has been pushing into new enclosures such as its digital power division, which includes a focus on energy infrastructure in areas such as electric transports and renewables.
This segment — still a very new business — saw revenue rise 24.4% to 68.7 billion yuan.
Cloud determining revenue came in at 38.5 billion yuan, up 8.5% year-on-year. Huawei said that when cloud sellings to its own business units are taken into account, the total revenue for the division is 68.8 billion.
Huawei’s smallest task, called Intelligent Automotive Solution, reported a 474.4% year-on-year rise in revenue to 26.4 billion yuan. Huawei begins in-car software as well as driver assistance systems for third-party automakers.