Tech war: Huawei faced difficult days as global smartphone sales plunged, executive says

Huawei Technologies faced “incredibly difficult” days after the United States government blacklisted the company, according to senior executive Richard Yu Chengdong, as the firm’s lucrative smartphone business went from riches to rags amid stifling trade restrictions.

Yu, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, on Monday said in a live-streamed conversation with Chinese influencer Dong Yuhui that the company saw annual smartphone shipments plunge to around 20 million units, as Washington tightened curbs on the export of advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment to mainland China in 2022.

Shenzhen-based Huawei’s smartphone shipments totalled only 28.1 million units in 2022, when it ranked 10th in the industry and market leader Samsung Electronics shipped 258.5 million units worldwide, according to data from market research firm Omdia. In 2019, the same year Washington added Huawei to its Entity List over national security concerns, the Chinese firm shipped more than 240 million smartphones worldwide.

“My team wasn’t able to start operations,” Yu said. “As the global leader in 5G technology, we didn’t even have 5G [smartphones] ourselves. Our days were incredibly difficult.”

The highly outspoken Yu, whose off-the-cuff comments have earned him the nickname “Big Mouth Yu” from Chinese internet users, led Huawei’s march to wrest the crown of the world’s biggest smartphone vendor from Samsung in the second quarter of 2020.