"In less than two years, the United States slapped four rounds of sanctions against Huawei, with each round harsher than before. [The sanctions] caused extreme difficulties to Huawei’s consumer businesses and made it impossible for us to ship our products," Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, wrote in a post on his WeChat account.
Yu elaborated that Huawei lost its market share in the high-end segment in China to Apple, while losing the medium-to-low end segment to domestic rivals including Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi. In international markets, Huawei lost its market share to Apple, Samsung and other Chinese brands, Yu added.
In May 2019, the United States added Huawei to the so-called Entity List, which prohibited US companies from doing business with listed companies without prior approval from the US government.
The US sanctions have created serious challenges to Huawei’s smartphone business, as the Chinese company not only lost access to Google’s popular mobile services, but also faced challenges in securing supplies of microprocessors to power its devices.
In the latest earnings report for the first quarter of this year, Huawei’s revenues fell 16.5% year-on-year to 152.2 billion yuan (about $23.5 billion). The company said in a statement explaining that the revenue decline was caused by Huawei selling its Honor smartphone brand in November last year.
Under pressure from US sanctions, Huawei decided to sell its popular Honor smartphone brand last year, as part of the efforts to minimize the sanctions’ impact and allow the brand to continue to operate independently.
At the same time, Huawei’s key rival Apple reported double-digit sales growth in the second quarter of this year on Wednesday.
According to the second quarter earnings report from Apple, the company’s revenues jumped by 53.7% year-on-year to $89.58 billion, while revenues from its popular iPhone skyrocketed by 65.5% year-on-year to $47.94 billion.
