Huawei boosts up profit to 28.1pc

Huawei Technology Ltd., the Chinese maker of smartphones and telecom equipment, said Friday its profit rose 28.1 per cent in 2017, boosted by strong enterprise and consumer sales.

Huawei said it earned 47.5 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) for the year, a marked improvement over the previous year, when profit rose just 0.4 per cent due to higher spending on research and marketing.

Total revenue rose 15.7 per cent over 2016 to 603.6 billion yuan ($96.2 billion).

The company headquartered in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen is the No. 3 global seller of smartphones behind Samsung Electronics Ltd. and Apple Inc. It competes with Sweden's LM Ericsson for the status of biggest maker of network equipment used by phone and internet companies.

Huawei, founded in 1987, is owned by its employees, with no publicly traded shares, but reports financial results in an effort to allay security concerns in the United States, Europe and Australia.

The company had planned to announce its first distribution agreement with a US carrier in January but that was cancelled without explanation. News reports said the carrier was AT&T Inc. and the company backed out due to pressure from US authorities.

Huawei and Honour smartphone brands shipped 153 million handsets last year for total sales of 237.2 billion yuan ($37.8 billion), a 39.1 per cent increase, the company said. Sales of cloud, data centre and other enterprise products and services rose 35.1 per cent to 54.9 billion yuan ($8.7 billion).

Revenue for Huawei's carrier business rose a more modest 2.5 per cent to 297.8 billion yuan ($47.5 billion).

Research and development spending increased 17.5 per cent over 2016 to 89.7 billion yuan ($14.3 billion). Huawei reports the highest R&D spending of any Chinese company.