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Huawei half-year revenue climbs to $48 billion

Huawei made 326 billion yuan, or almost $48 billion, in revenue during the first half of 2018.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Recent security concerns over Huawei have yet to impact its bottom line, with the Chinese tech giant's revenue growing by 15 percent to 325.7 billion yuan ($47.8 billion) over the first half of 2018.

While Huawei has yet to reveal the full numbers for the six-month period, it also reported 14 percent growth in its operating margin, saying it anticipates a strong full-year 2018 result.

Across its carrier business, Huawei said it is focused on 5G along with 4G LTE Advanced solutions, along with its intent-driven networks, cloud, datacentre, and Internet of Things (IoT) offerings.

"Ultimately, the shared goal is to help carriers future-proof their businesses by enabling all-cloud networks, connecting more people and things, and building out network infrastructure," Huawei explained.

In its enterprise segment, Huawei said it will continue delivering IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud, and datacentre services to government and enterprise customers across energy, transportation, finance, and manufacturing in particular.

"By building open ICT platforms, OpenLabs, and platforms for global marketing, training, and services, Huawei is attracting more and more partners, enabling joint innovation, and building an ecosystem around joint customer services," the company added.

During 2018, Huawei said it has so far launched EI Intelligent Twins, which enables AI "practical application" across industrial businesses; announced a network cloud server labelled C3ne, which it said improves performance to the tune of tens of millions of packets each second; and received Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) certification for Huawei Cloud, as well as Level 4 Classified Cybersecurity Protection with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security regulations.

Lastly, its consumer business saw the company launch the Huawei P20 smartphone series, the Huawei MateBook X Pro, and new GPU technology during the half.

IDC this week also revealed that Huawei surpassed Apple in global smartphone shipments during Q2, with the Chinese tech giant shipping 54.2 million smartphone during the quarter while Apple shipped 41.3 million units.

Samsung retained the top global spot, however, shipping 75.1 million units.

Read more: Paranoia will destroy us: Why Chinese tech isn't spying on us

Huawei had in April announced full-year net profit of 47.5 billion yuan for 2017, up 22.7 percent from the 37.1 billion yuan reported a year earlier, attributing the result to its smartphones, enterprise solutions, and the digital transformation across industries.

The Chinese networking giant brought in 603.6 billion yuan ($92.5 billion) revenue during the year, up 15.7 percent from 521.6 billion yuan in 2016.

The use of Huawei technology in telecommunications infrastructure has been facing national security concerns in both the United States and in Australia, however.

In response, Huawei's Australia CEO George Huang told ZDNet last month that the company handles no personal data, when asked about recent calls for the technology giant to be barred from taking part in 5G rollouts due to concerns over sharing data with the Chinese government.

"Huawei doesn't own, doesn't manage, doesn't operate any data," Huang told ZDNet.

"Huawei is just a network equipment vendor to the operators. Operators, they manage, they operate the network. The application of Huawei is to support our customers -- that means operators -- to build the system to manage those things.

"Huawei is just a vendor of the pipeline."

Last month, the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) also found several low-priority security issues in its annual evaluation of Huawei's Cyber Security Evaluation Centre.

However, the NCSC overall found Huawei to be providing "unique, world-class cybersecurity expertise".

"Due to areas of concern exposed through the proper functioning of the mitigation strategy and associated oversight mechanisms, the oversight board can provide only limited assurance that all risks to UK national security from Huawei's involvement in the UK's critical networks have been sufficiently mitigated. We are advising the National Security Adviser on this basis," the report said.

"Until this work is completed, the oversight board can offer only limited assurance due to the lack of the required end-to-end traceability from source code examined by HCSEC through to executables use by the UK operators."

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