Huawei's financials take a beating as President Trump's sanctions come home to roost

US sanctions are starting to have a pronounced impact on Huawei’s financials, with the embattled Chinese telco reporting just single digit year-on-year growth for the first three quarters of 2020. Revenues to the end of September were 671.3 billion CNY (circa $100.4 billion, or £77 billion, at today’s exchange rates), up 9.9 …

[martinusher]

All Important?

The "all important" Google Play Store may not be that important, especially in the light of the recent anti-trust filing against Google by the DoJ.

The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows. Both are adequate solutions for the software for these devices, both work just about as well as they need to and at a price point which makes it not cost effective to develop an alternative. Alternatives do exist, though, and are likely to be technically better because they can learn from the existing dominant systems. All that's needed is some kind of market push to get some traction for any alternative, say a large manufacturer with a large and motivated user base, and its likely to become a serious competitor.

I tend to think that the US government's actions over Huawei are likely to do far more damage to Google than their anti-trust suit. The suit might keep generations of lawyers gainfully employed but actively encouraging a competitor -- a motivated competitor with a motivated customer base -- has the potential to undermine core segments of Google's business (as well as damaging the basis of the anti-trust suit -- after all, there are alternatives.....).

[CrackedNoggin]

Re: All Important?

Critically however, Android and all Google software service products have already been banned in China for a while. The US biggest losers are likely to be chip companies that sold to Huawei. But their loss (and potentially their strategy for recovery from that loss) have only been advanced by a few years, after which similar good enough China sourced chips would have been available anyway.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: All Important?

"The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows."

True, but the reason is that this is what customers have been trained to expect by the efforts of large, dominant corporations imposing their will on the H/W suppliers. The customers are so well trained thet you hear squeals of horror from some of them any time you suggest the alternatives.

[Anonymous Coward]

adequate?

The reality of Android is, it runs little applets and medium games but only if they're in the foreground. It is a fully featured OS, crippled by some staggeringly crap design choices.

If Huawei don't need to stick to the Google craptastic choices, then they can take it upwards and into Microsoft's area. It has a full featured API, yet you cannot ensure an app remains running even! Insane optimizations that could only ever work for mini-applets.

Currently Huawei can still make and sell Microsoft Windows PCs, so presumably there's been some Trump/QPQ to enable that.

But Huawei could easily make a desktop Android without those bad choices and could easily take he rest of Chinese PC makers with them.

[DryBones]

Re: adequate?

I am unsure I understand your logic.

Phones have a limited amount of battery power available to them, and thus having 4 desktop applications running at full trot in the background, even if the processor can quite happily manage it, seems like a 'bad design decision' to me.

Have you seen the Chrome OS, lately? I hear it's a thing on laptop form-factor computers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just single digit growth hey? Not bad in the covid-19 era!

[six_tymes]

awww, poor Huawei, making less billions than the many billions they already have and not able to spread their back door Trojans. cry me a river.

[Silverburn]

Wait until you learn what the US does under the guise of "state sponsored actor".

[DavCrav]

"Wait until you learn what the US does under the guise of "state sponsored actor"."

Is it force a million ethnic-minority women to marry dominant-race men, then subject them to repeated state-orchestrated rape?

No wait, that one's China.

[Anonymous Coward]

history boy

look at what the merkins did to the indians at home and the asians in there home and trying to do to the arabs in there home, mexicans, south americans their destroying whole economys

narrow minded or what

look what the merkins are doing to Australia

China's not so bad as the merkins.

I love a merckier it a great place to keep merkins just they keep getting out,

[martinusher]

What on Earth are you on about?

[DavCrav]

"What on Earth are you on about?"

Everyone knows about the mass imprisonments, the medical experiments on prisoners, the organ harvesting, the murder of Indian soldiers, the kidnap diplomacy, the threatening countries for offering asylum, and so on. The other one is a million Han men being shipped over to be married off to Muslim women, against their will, and living with them.

So industiral-scale sex slavery.

[Dr_N]

six_tymes> and not able to spread their back door

To quote another Commentard, ”most people in the know, are aware of who the propagandists are, most post made up regurgitated garbage and post using the coward mask icon.”

But I disagree about the AC bit.

[CrackedNoggin]

As for Huawei's own OS (currently an Android fork), I can't see it having any advantage over Android in first world countries, and China just killed any chance of cooperation with Huawei in India for the forseeable future (that was an expensive brawl!) thereby cutting Huawei's potential market outside of the first world in half.

However if Huawei had a policy to provide a public and consistent long term interface for loading alternative OS they could establish a niche market, and simultaneously seed (a) new competitor(s) to Android in the long run. At first, I think a niche exists for apps that need privacy and security, and/or don't necessarily even require a SIM card. E.g., a secure time based authenticator, or navigation devices to be used outside of cell range. And once such usage started to spread, an Android competitor could gradually materialize.

Personally, I'd prefer to see Samsung go there first. I do think that as an anti trust goal goes, trying to get more non-google apps on android is kind of pointless - much better to encourage (or require?) cellphones to be friendly for loading alternative OS.

Maybe the Pine64 will fill that niche, but they have a long way to go in hardware.

[Doctor Syntax]

The writ is just waiting for January. It still depends on which January.

[Sense Amidst Madness]

Good. I hope they go out of business.

[Intractable Potsherd]

Three posts since 7th September, all on the same topic. File as troll and ignore.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad to see the pitiful state of modern trolls.

[Anonymous Coward]

Balances out all the whatabout-the-NSA trolling I guess

[GraXXoR]

Just single digit growth.

I can’t help but thinking the language used here is trying to spin the situation as negatively as possible.

Since when, during a global pandemic and Asia’s worst recession in record is “single digit growth” to be considered negative?

[Santa from Exeter]

Re: Just single digit growth.

Since the need for people to justify the Orange Shitgibbons childish tantrums

[Anonymous Coward]

“Remember, don’t buy Huawei”

If only the US + the rest of the free world would make the same effort to reduce their dependence on the CCP. Trump can only do so much with limited powers, it’s down to everyone else to stop supporting the CCP.

Buy From CCP controlled companies and you’re indirectly supporting the systematic theft of intellectual property, suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, re-education camps for Uighurs, innocent Westerners detained and sometimes tortured as tit-for-tat political pawns, fishing trawlers raiding other nation’s territorial waters, Covid victims welded in their homes, mobile execution vans, organ harvesting from political prisoners...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: “Remember, don’t buy Huawei”

>>re-education camps for Uighurs

Exactly the right thing to do. Apparently, According to ... checks notes... President Trump.