Next year, Huawei Technologies Co. will reform its executive ranks after a further downturn in revenue growth in the latter half of 2019, when more consumers and suppliers around the globe spoke of US sanctions.
The largest technology company in China posted an 18 percent increase in sales this year to 850 billion yuan ($120 billion), down from about 23 percent in the first half and meeting its internal targets.
Huawei will expect a similar hit in 2020 if the White House retains restrictions on the selling of software and the circuitry it requires, such as critical Android phone devices, said Rotating Chairman Eric Xu in a memo to 190,000 Huawei employees.
After the US blacklisted Huawei, calling the company a "threat to national security", the Chinese tech behemoth took a war stance.
Huawei, in response, mobilized thousands of engineers to build alternatives to vital U.S. products to keep their factories humming, while at the same time attracting domestic consumers to accelerate shipment growth of 16.5 percent to 240 million smartphones in 2019.
Yet Xu spoke in his memo of the need to root out as many as 10 percents of the worst-performing managers of the company in 2020. Many support or even operating units will be consolidated or reduced, Xu said, adding staff may be reassigned to other divisions.
"Survival is going to be our priority," said Xu, one of three executives taking turns managing the tech company throughout the year, in a memo to Bloomberg.
According to Xu, the company is not going to "grow as quickly as we did in the first half of 2019", growth that continued throughout the year as a result of sheer business momentum.
US sanctions have particularly hit Huawei's smartphone unit, as the company is barred from using Google's Android operating system and apps including Google Play and Gmail, Huawei's billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei said.
Huawei, the second-biggest smartphone vendor in the world, has increased its global smartphone shipments in the third quarter of the year by 28 percent, further closing the gap with Samsung Electronics Co., according to IDC's latest data. The development was driven primarily by domestic demand, where Huawei had a market share of over 40 percent.
Meanwhile, a top Huawei executive says 2019 was a good year for the Chinese tech firm. But next year appears to be "difficult" as it struggles with a prolonged blacklist campaign.
According to a new year's message by Xu, the company estimates that sales revenue reached 850 billion Chinese yuan ($122 billion) in 2019, a 19 percent improvement over the previous year.
