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The figures represent a slowdown in growth for Huawei, as competition in the Chinese market intensifies
Huawei expects total revenues for 2017 to reach $92.08 billion (600 billion yuan), a 15% increase from 2016, according to the company’s rotating CEO Ken Hu.
In his New Year’s message, Hu praised the company’s continued expansion, but also challenged the company to accelerate growth.
"Huawei’s own success depends on two critical factors: First, strategically speaking, we have to steer ourselves in the right general direction. We can’t be overly precise; we may need to adjust course when uncertainties come our way. Second, we need to ensure the ongoing vitality of our organisation, which is growing larger by the day. These are both formidable tasks. We must have strategic confidence in ourselves, and move forward with resolve," he said.
A 15% increase in revenues would represent the slowest growth in 4 years for Huawei. Hu said that the company would look to reignite that growth rate by focussing its activities on the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).
To bring about a fully connected world, we have to take the lead in connecting all people and things, and continue to build on our existing strengths in this domain. To enable a future world where all things can sense their environment, we will focus on building and consolidating our strengths in connectivity, edge computing, and distributed computing. And finally, there is intelligence itself. Bringing intelligence to all things relies on the convergence of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT). Here, our sweet spot is cloud computing, big data, and AI platforms, as well as on-device AI. These technologies will power intelligent telecom networks, enable industrial intelligence, and help us optimise our own internal management processes," he said.
Hu also hinted that the company would be willing to delegate more responsibility to its regional centres, to make it more agile and nimble.
"To adapt to a more complex business structure, we will gradually establish a decentralized operations model in which centralised governance and individual business unit governance can co-exist. Responsibilities and authority will be clearly defined, operations will be more efficient, and oversight more effective. This will allow our business units to grow in the manner they see fit, while operating under the auspices of a shared platform and a shared system of values," he said.
