By Sean Kinney, Editor in Chief

As US trade sanctions designed to cut off Huawei, and other Chinese firms, from accessing some technologies continue to take a toll, the Chinese technology giant has reported a year-over-year decrease in revenue. But that decline was offset by a major increase in annual net profits.

Huawei reported 2021 annual revenue just shy of US$100 billion, down 28.6 per cent from the previous year. Net profits increased nearly 76 per cent to US$17.8 billion. The firm also called out that R&D spend amounted to 22.4 per cent of total annual revenue. Huawei noted in a statement it will “continuously increase” R&D investment.

Broken down by business units, Huawei’s two biggest lines of revenue–its carrier and consumer segments–both showed year-over-year revenue decreases. On the other hand, the enterprise business unit grew just more than 2 per cent.

In terms of revenue by region, China remains far-and-away Huawei’s biggest buyer followed by EMEA, the Americas and Asia-Pacific, all of which showed year-over-year decreases.

Rotating Chairman Guo Ping noted performance was in line with projections. “Our carrier business remained stable, our enterprise business experienced steady growth, and our consumer business quickly expanded into new domains. In addition, we embarked on a fast track of ecosystem development.”

That ecosystem bit is a key part of how Huawei can continue developing robust product sets without access to some suppliers and technologies. Specifically, Huawei has an enterprise developer-focused ecosystem to support cloud sales, an open hardware/software play, its HarmonyOS mobile operating system, and in automotive involving more than 300 upstream and downstream partners.

Big picture, “Despite a revenue decline in 2021, our ability to make a profit and generate cash flows is increasing, and we are more capable of dealing with uncertainty,” CFO Meng Wanzhou said in a statement.