Huawei closed 2024 with its strongest revenue growth in five years, but net profit fell by more than a quarter. It’s a sign that the Chinese tech giant is still balancing rebuilding its position in the consumer sector with the burden of investing for the future – and missing the one-off revenues that helped it the year before.
Net profit fell 28% to 62.6 billion yuan (approximately US$8.63 billion). Huawei explains this by record spending on research and development – reaching almost 20% of total revenue – and the lack of revenue from the sale of the Honor brand, which gave a one-time boost to the bottom line in 2023.
Despite this, revenue rose 22.4 per cent to 862.1 billion yuan. This is the third consecutive year of growth after a sharp decline in 2021, which was the result of US sanctions restricting Huawei’s access to Google‘s advanced chips and services .
ICT infrastructure accounted for the largest share of revenue, generating almost 370 billion yuan, growing by 4.9% year-on-year. However, it was the consumer segment – which includes smartphones – that grew the most rapidly: by 38%, to 339 billion yuan. This growth may be indicative of a rebuilding of its position in the mobile market, despite the persistent lack of Google services in the company’s products.
In contrast, the intelligent automotive solutions unit – previously thought to be an experiment – saw its revenue more than quadruple, exceeding 26 billion yuan and generating a profit for the first time. This signals that Huawei’s strategy of providing technology to automakers is starting to yield concrete results.
Profitability was down: gross profit margin was 44.4%, compared to 46.2% a year earlier. The company explains this, among other things, by high R&D costs and a long-term approach to reinvesting in strategic technologies – such as Ascend chips, Kunpeng processors, the HarmonyOS operating system and its own cloud solutions.
Huawei emphasises that it is not only returning to the market with greater confidence, but is also beginning to play an increasingly important role in China’s technology ecosystem. For many partners and integrators, this means that the company could become one of the main drivers of local innovation, independent of Western suppliers.
From the perspective of the IT channel – both integrators and resellers – Huawei remains a player that relies on long-term stability and a strong ecosystem footprint. At the same time, however, its global expansion still faces geopolitical constraints that may make it difficult to scale beyond China and selected emerging markets.
