The founder and CEO of Chinese tech giant Huawei said the company will miss revenue forecasts by about $30 billion over the next couple of years and he blamed a US campaign against its business.
“In the next two years, I think we will reduce our capacity, our revenue will be down by about $30 billion compared to the forecast, so our sales revenue this year and next year will be about $100 billion,” Ren Zhengfei said Monday during a panel discussion at Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen.
The embattled Chinese tech firm has become a flashpoint in the US-China trade war. The Trump administration delivered a huge blow on May 16, when it added Huawei to a blacklist that bars US companies from selling it technology without first obtaining a license to do so.
Huawei became the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker and the No. 2 smartphone brand, despite being locked out of the US market for nearly a decade.
But just four weeks on the US trade blacklist is hitting the company hard, hurting its smartphone business and eroding its dominance in 5G equipment.
So far this year, overseas smartphone unit sales have “dropped by 40%,” Ren said.
Mobile networks in countries like Japan and the United Kingdom have delayed the launch of Huawei smartphones, and companies like Google and Facebook have been forced to suspend access to some of their services from the Chinese firm’s new devices.
