Huawei’s CEO has confirmed that the company will now be focusing solely on sustainable growth. Most companies tend to have some kind of sales target for their fiscal years, but Huawei doesn’t appear to be following this trend. According to a WeChat conversation with the company’s CEO Yu Chengdong, the company has no sales target. Instead, it’s goal is to continue growing at a sustainable rate while improving profits.
It was rumored for some time that Huawei had an internal sales target of 200 million smartphone sales for 2018, but the company’s CEO has denied these rumors, stating that Huawei doesn’t pursue sales targets, instead it maintains a healthy and sustainable growth, something that makes perfect sense. After all, 200 million units would represent a huge increase over the 153 million units the company sold in 2017 – this number itself was only a slight increase over the 139 million units sold in the prior year – and, even with a strong level of growth, hitting the target would be pretty difficult, especially after the company’s deal with AT&T collapsed. But despite only moderate growth last year, Huawei reached a 10 percent global market share and finished in the Top 3 worldwide, while it also maintained its share of the Chinese market, where overall sales are declining steadily. Now, although Huawei’s overall sales number only increased marginally year-over-year, their revenue did increase pretty significantly, with numbers expected to hit the equivalent of $36 billion for 2017, a 30 percent increase over the previous year. To further continue with this growth, the company’s CEO believes it should concentrate on low-end devices in order to expand their reach and market share in overseas markets.
For now, Huawei doesn’t seem to be too worried about reaching 200 million shipments, but considering its aim is to become the number one smartphone manufacturer worldwide, sooner or later the company will be forced to surpass this number and could even need to surpass the 300 million mark in order to reach their goal. For now, however, it’ll remain to be seen how Huawei performs throughout 2018 after its big setback in the US market, a deal the company appeared to be counting on in order to begin selling their phones in high quantities in the market while continuing on its growth path.