Huawei on Tuesday confirmed its 2014 financial results and announced that Eric Xu will take charge of the company as per its rotating CEO policy.
Revenue came in at CNY288.2 billion (US$46.5 billion), up 20.6% on 2013 and in line with the preliminary results the Chinese telco vendor disclosed in January. Huawei’s operating profit increased to CNY34.2 billion ($5.5 billion) from CNY29.1 billion, while net profit surged 32.7% to CNY27.9 billion.
"Our strong revenue growth in 2014 can be attributed to a continuous focus on our pipe strategy, while profit increase stems from streamlined management and improvements in overall efficiency," said Ken Hu, Huawei’s outgoing rota ting CEO, in a statement. "With heavy investment in innovations in areas such as cloud computing, big data, 5G, SDN and NFV, we believe we are well positioned to capture the tremendous business opportunities in this digital transformation era."
At Huawei’s network division, revenue grew 16.4% on last year to CNY192.1 billion, driven by strong, global demand for mobile broadband. Its consumer business generated revenue of CNY75.1 billion, up 32.6% on 2013. Meanwhile its enterprise division saw revenues grow 27.3% to CNY19.4 billion.
On a geographic basis, China overtook EMEA in 2014 to become Huawei’s single biggest region in terms of revenue, generating CNY108.9 billion compared to EMEA’s CNY101.0 billion (see chart). In 2013, those figures were CNY82.8 billion and CNY84 billion respectively. Huawei attributed the growth in China to the rapid deployment of TD-LTE networks.
Also on Tuesday, Huawei announced that from 1 April, Eric Xu will once again become its rotating CEO for the next six months.
The rotating CEO role was created in April 2012 as a means of helping Huawei become more agile and able to tap emerging industry trends. Xu last held the position from October 2013 to March 2014. Founder Ren Zhengfei remains Huawei’s permanent CEO.
