Huawei’s Q3 financials have been revealed and most of the key businesses seem to be doing great. Overall, the company managed to rake in revenue of CNY610.8 billion or around $86 billion. This represents year-over-year growth of 24.2 percent. The Chinese giant’s net profit margin for the July-September period was 8.7 percent.
Huawei says that it shipped more than 185 million handsets during the first three quarters of 2019, which is a 26 percent increase over the same period last year. Interestingly, the company didn’t mention the exact figure for the third quarter of 2019, which makes us wonder if the shipments were lower than expected.
Huawei’s Q3 Results Imply It Sold 67 Million Handsets From July-September
Since the U.S. struck in May, Q3 was the first quarter to fully experience the effects of the ban. And since the embargo was temporarily put on hold to ease the transition, we can expect the next quarter to be even more reflective of the impact.
Anyhow, the general consensus is that 67 million smartphones were sold in Q3, which is not bad at all. In fact, it’s actually an improvement over the first two quarters. However, analysts believe that the momentum will eventually slow down. After all, Huawei’s phones no longer come with Google’s app and services, and this will likely impact sales. In fact, that’s supposedly the reason why the company has heavily discounted the Mate 30 series phones in China. This way, the domestic market will likely pick up some of the slack. Even then, Digitimes expects Apple to reclaim the silver spot in the worldwide smartphone seller ranking by Q4. Huawei’s Q3 report also says that PC, tablet, wearables, and smart audio devices did well too.
The Chinese company says that so far, it has entered over 60 commercial contracts for 5G with carriers all over the world. The tech juggernaut has shipped 400,000 5G Massive MIMO active antenna units (AAUs) to date.
Huawei’s Q3 report also reveals that currently 228 Fortune Global 500 companies and 58 Fortune Global 100 firms in 700 cities use its Horizon Digital Platform. With this program, Huawei helps companies with digital transformations. Huawei also says that it’s continuing its push into cloud service development and the unit is growing at a rapid pace.
The Current Quarter Can Prove To Be More Challenging
Side by side, the battered company is also ramping up efforts to strengthen its software department. It says that its Mobile Services ecosystem is developing rapidly. The company currently boasts 1.07 million registered developers all over the world.
Although the HarmonyOS wasn’t mentioned, CEO Ren Zhengfei recently said that in two to three years, it will be able to beat Android in terms of efficiency. The company also claims that the Honor Vision smart screen, which is its first product to run HarmonyOS, has received praise from the industry and consumers. Specifics weren’t revealed, which is understandable, as it hasn’t been long since the product’s launch.
Times are undeniably tough for Huawei right now. As the failed attempts by Windows and Amazon have shown, developing an operating system is far from easy. And even if the company gets it right, its stock of critical components is reportedly running low. We will have to wait and see how the manufacturer fights the storm.