Huawei Reports Solid Smartphone Growth Despite US Blacklisting

Huawei is not a publicly-traded company which means, among other things, it is not legally required to makes its financial information public. In fact, it never did until just this year, conveniently coinciding with the ban that the US imposed on Huawei from buying American goods. This was most likely a strategy to show how the company can continue to operate in the face of such a predicament and its Q3 2019 numbers for smartphone shipments suggest exactly that.

The US government put Huawei on a blacklist that practically blocked American companies from selling goods, be it hardware or software, that were made in the US to the Chinese company. Although the US did make some exemptions here and there and even gave a three-month delay, the future looked bleak for Huawei if the status quo continued. Huawei is trying to prove otherwise.

It says that in the past 9 months from January to September 2019, it was able to ship more than 185 million smartphones. That, it says, represents a 26% increase from the same period last year. It does actually give concrete details but The New York Times that that amounted to $86 billion, a 25% increase in revenue year-on-year. The publication also estimates that the sales growth for the third quarter alone was 27%, up from 13% from the same period last year.

This definitely flies in the face of predictions and analyses, which is probably the exact reaction that Huawei wants the public to have. That said, the last quarter will actually be the most telling since it is only then that the Google-less Huawei Mate 30 would have entered the market.

Also, take those figures with a grain of salt as, unlike a publicly-traded company, Huawei may not disclose everything that needs to be disclosed and may be spinning things in a positive light. After all, all that it really wants is for the world to know that they will survive, at least for now.