Huawei shuts down less popular office app Link Now as it scales back noncore businesses in fight for survival

Huawei’s Zoom-like Link Now platform, launched mid-pandemic, stopped new user registrations on October 16 and will end service on December 16
The tech giant is pulling back months after warning that it would be making cuts to noncore businesses as it seeks to survive US sanctions

Huawei

Iris Dengin Shenzhen

Published: 9:00pm, 21 Oct, 2022

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Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co, which is struggling under US sanctions, is shutting down its online collaboration app Link Now two years after launch as the Shenzhen-based company moves to consolidate its noncore businesses.

Huawei announced that as of October 16 Link Now is no longer accepting new user registrations “due to a product strategy adjustment”, according to a notice on the platform’s website. Service will end for all users on December 16.

Link Now launched in the summer of 2020, when widespread lockdowns and work-from-home arrangements led to a surge in demand for cloud services facilitating remote work and schooling. Similar to Zoom or Google Meet, Huawei’s tool was designed primarily to host online meetings and classes with up to 300 participants and 50 concurrent users of the video and audio functions, according to the website.

Huawei’s Zoom-like Link Now platform, seen on Apple’s App Store in China on October 21, 2022. Photo: Handout

Unlike many similar tools, though, Link Now was completely free, never maturing to the point of charging for an enterprise tier.

Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Link Now’s closure.

In August, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei warned employees that the company would have to scale back or divest noncore businesses to survive, according a leaked internal memo. The world’s largest telecoms equipment maker has struggled with declining revenues and profit in the wake of US sanctions, which all but killed the company’s once-lucrative smartphone business and forced it to search for new sources of growth.

Huawei’s revenues shrank further in the first half of 2022, falling 5.9 per cent year on year to 301.6 billion yuan (US$44.7 billion). Its net profit margin fell to 5 per cent from 9.8 per cent in the same period last year. In 2021, company headcount fell by 2,000 people, its first drop since 2008.

Link Now is exiting a fiercely competitive market of workplace apps in China, with Alibaba Group Holding’s Dingtalk, Tencent Holdings’ WeCom and ByteDance’s Feishu – known internationally as Lark – among the biggest players. At stake is a digital workplace market that was valued at more than 26.2 billion yuan by the end of last year, according to data analytics firm iiMedia Research.

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Alibaba’s DingTalk said its user numbers surpassed 500 million last October, while the number of institutions using the service reached 19 million. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Tencent’s WeCom recorded 180 million active users and 10 million organisations in January. WeCom’s links to the company’s multipurpose messaging platform WeChat also helped it reach 500 million of that app’s 1.2 billion users.

Link Now is not even Huawei’s only online office platform. The company’s main service for this is WeLink, which launched at the end of 2019.

Huawei said last year that WeLink added hundreds of thousands of enterprise clients and over 1 million daily active users during the pandemic. However, it still lags far behind its two biggest rivals. DingTalk and WeCom are the first and second biggest remote work tools in the country, respectively, according to market data firm Quest Mobile, followed by Tencent Meeting and Feishu.