The Chinese telecoms giant faces a new existential threat from U.S. sanctions. But Washington is still finding international support for its campaign against Huawei hard to come by.
Eric Xu at the Global Analyst Summit in Shenzhen, April 12, 2021. Credit: Huawei
To ring in 2023, Huawei’s chairman Eric Xu declared that the embattled telecommunications giant had finally achieved a semblance of normalcy. “In 2022, we successfully pulled ourselves out of crisis mode,” Xu said in a New Year message to employees. “U.S. restrictions are our new normal, and we're back to business as usual.”
Such optimism was a far cry from the death spiral analysts predicted Huawei would enter in 2020, after the Trump administration issued sanctions designed to starve the company of advanced semiconductor chips.
Those restrictions have crushed Huawei’s ability to compete in smartphones with rivals like Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. In 2020, Huawei was China’s top smartphone seller, accounting for 41 percent of all sales; by last year it had slumped to sixth place, with its market share plummeting to 7.9 percent.
Yet Huawei’s other business lines have proven more resilient, including its core product of building IT infrastructure networks,
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