Despite Trump’s trade war, Huawei’s revenue soars

Huawei has announced its financial results for its April-June quarter, and things are looking a lot better for the company than you would expect. Despite the American-Chinese trade war and the Trump administration’s ban on American companies doing business with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant’s revenue soared last quarter. Huawei made 221.6 billion yuan ($32.2 billion)—a 23% increase over the previous quarter.

Revenue wasn’t the only thing flying for Huawei—the company sold 118 million smartphones in the first half of 2019—a 24% year-over-year increase. And despite the U.S. urging other countries not to use Huawei products in their 5G networks, Huawei announced that to date it has secured 50 commercial 5G contracts and shipped more than 150,000 5G base stations to markets around the world.

As for what the future holds for Huawei given the political and trade headwinds it faces, the company’s chairman, Liang Hua, said in a press release:

Revenue grew fast up through May. Given the foundation we laid in the first half of the year, we continue to see growth even after we were added to the entity list. That’s not to say we don’t have difficulties ahead. We do, and they may affect the pace of our growth in the short term. But we will stay the course. We are fully confident in what the future holds, and we will continue investing as planned—including a total of CNY120 billion in R&D this year. We’ll get through these challenges, and we’re confident that Huawei will enter a new stage of growth after the worst of this is behind us.