Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd.
2023 Annual Report
We've been through a lot over the past few years. But through one challenge after another, we've managed to grow. We rounded off 2023 with CNY704.2 billion in revenue. Our ICT infrastructure business remained solid, and our consumer business met expectations. Both our cloud computing and digital power businesses grew steadily, and our intelligent automotive solution business began large-scale delivery.
Hu Houkun
Rotating Chairman
No matter what changes come our way, we will stay committed to openness, collaboration, and innovation. We will continue to press ahead against all manner of difficulties and stay true to our vision and mission – to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world.
Liang Hua
Chairman of the Board
Financial Performance
Our overall performance was in line with forecast
Five-Year Financial Highlights
| 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (USD Million) | (CNY Million) | (CNY Million) | ||||
| Revenue | 99,448 | 704,174 | 642,338 | 636,807 | 891,368 | 858,833 |
| Operating profit | 14,744 | 104,401 | 42,216 | 121,412 | 72,501 | 77,835 |
| Operating margin | 14.8% | 14.8% | 6.6% | 19.1% | 8.1% | 9.1% |
| Net profit | 12,280 | 86,950 | 35,562 | 113,718 | 64,649 | 62,656 |
| Cash flow from operating activities | 9,859 | 69,807 | 17,797 | 59,670 | 35,218 | 91,384 |
| Cash and short-term investments | 67,128 | 475,317 | 373,452 | 416,334 | 357,366 | 371,040 |
| Working capital | 59,550 | 421,662 | 344,938 | 376,923 | 299,062 | 257,638 |
| Total assets | 178,454 | 1,263,597 | 1,063,804 | 982,971 | 876,854 | 858,661 |
| Total borrowings | 43,556 | 308,414 | 197,144 | 175,100 | 141,811 | 112,162 |
| Equity | 71,682 | 507,568 | 437,076 | 414,652 | 330,408 | 295,537 |
| Liability ratio | 59.8% | 59.8% | 58.9% | 57.8% | 62.3% | 65.6% |
| Note: Converted into United States dollars (“USD”) using the closing rate at the end of 2023 of USD1.00 = CNY7.0808. | ||||||
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By Business Segment
| (CNY Million) | 2023 | 2022 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| ICT Infrastructure | 361,997 | 353,978 | 2.3% |
| Consumer | 251,496 | 214,463 | 17.3% |
| Cloud Computing | 55,287 | 45,342 | 21.9% |
| Digital Power | 52,607 | 50,806 | 3.5% |
| Intelligent Automotive Solutions | 4,737 | 2,077 | 128.1% |
| Other | 8,624 | 3,978 | 116.8% |
| Elimination | (30,574) | (28,306) | 8.0% |
| Total | 704,174 | 642,338 | 9.6% |
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By Region
| (CNY Million) | 2023 | 2022 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 471,303 | 403,999 | 16.7% |
| EMEA | 145,343 | 149,206 | (2.6)% |
| Asia Pacific | 41,041 | 48,048 | (14.6)% |
| Americas | 35,362 | 31,898 | 10.9% |
| Other | 11,125 | 9,187 | 21.1% |
| Total | 704,174 | 642,338 | 9.6% |
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Research and Innovation
Every year, Huawei invests over 10% of its sales revenue into R&D
CNY1.11 trillion
Our total R&D investment over the last decade now exceeds CNY1.11 trillion
23.4%
In 2023, our total R&D spending reached CNY164.7 billion, representing 23.4% of our total revenue
55%
On December 31, 2023, 114,000 employees (about 55% of our workforce) worked in R&D
140,000+
By the end of 2023, Huawei held a total of 140,000+ active patents
Business Highlights
In 2023, our ICT infrastructure business remained solid, and our consumer business met expectations. Both our cloud computing and digital power businesses grew steadily, and our intelligent automotive solution business began large-scale delivery.
Driving Ubiquitous Connectivity
- We worked with carriers and partners around the world to continue securing 5G's business success. By the end of 2023, the number of 5G users across the globe had exceeded 1.5 billion, and 5G networks built by Huawei had continued to deliver leading experiences. Innovative applications, such as naked-eye 3D, New Calling, and cloud phones, have comprehensively upgraded personal service experiences. And 5G has enabled the large-scale digitalization of industries, with more than 50,000 5G applications being put into use in many different industries. In addition, Huawei actively worked with other industry players to drive the development of 5.5G, and partnered with leading carriers around the world to promote the technological verification and commercial deployment of 5.5G and accelerate rollout.
- We helped our carrier, government, and enterprise customers build ubiquitous optical networks and intelligent IP networks as well as 10 gigabit smart homes, High-Quality 10 Gbps CloudCampus, Super-Connectivity 400GE CloudFabric, and Converged IP Transport Network. This infrastructure will create a solid foundation for the digital transformation and intelligent upgrade of all industries.
- We deepened cooperation with international organizations to provide connectivity to remote areas and continuously increase the access of remote communities to digital technology.
Enabling Pervasive Intelligence
- Digital, intelligent, and low-carbon transformations are continuing to gain traction. Therefore, Huawei unveiled its All Intelligence strategy this year in order to support a vast range of AI models and applications for all industries and accelerate their intelligent transformation. The Kunpeng and Ascend ecosystems continued to grow steadily, attracting more than 5.7 million developers and 6,300 partners, and more than 17,400 solutions have been certified. Huawei also released a reference architecture that will drive industrial intelligent transformation, as well as a number of related solutions and a white paper titled Accelerating Intelligent Transformation, which offer practical advice and references that help industries make the most of intelligence.
- We released Pangu Models 3.0 to dive deep into industries and develop tailored models and capability sets for a wide range of industries, including finance, government services, manufacturing, mining, meteorology, railways, automobiles, and healthcare. These models combine industry know-how with foundation model capabilities, reshaping industries and boosting productivity and efficiency.
- In the intelligent automotive solution domain, we worked with more than 300 partners to build an intelligent industry ecosystem. Together, we have created experience benchmarks for intelligent driving, intelligent cockpits, and intelligent vehicle control and contributed to industry standards and key technologies, jointly expanding the market and accelerating the intelligent transformation of the automotive industry.
Delivering a Personalized Experience
- In the consumer business, we have continued to innovate by focusing on consumers, creating an inspired AI experience across all scenarios and building a high-end brand that has a human touch and is liked and trusted by consumers. We have also worked with our partners to build a prosperous HarmonyOS ecosystem and achieve business success.
- We launched smartphones like the HUAWEI Mate 60 Series and unveiled a new ultra-high-end brand ULTIMATE DESIGN, all winning high acclaim from consumers. By the end of 2023, Huawei had shipped a grand total of over 100 million tablets and over 150 million wearables around the world, and served more than 450 million users in the fitness and health domain. Under the Huawei Zhixuan model, we worked with partners around the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance (HIMA) to launch products that deliver ever-improving experiences.
- We officially launched HarmonyOS 4 in 2023, and by the end of the year HarmonyOS had been deployed on more than 800 million devices.
Building a Digital Platform
- As industries rush to embrace digital and intelligent transformation, Huawei Cloud continued to implement its Everything as a Service strategy, helping customers unleash the power of digital faster. By the end of 2023, Huawei Cloud was providing customers from more than 170 countries and regions with stable, reliable, secure, trustworthy, and sustainable cloud services.
- Huawei Cloud also actively innovated and launched the Ascend AI cloud service as well as the GaussDB distributed database, more than 20 software development tools, and products like the CraftArts hardware development pipeline, to help industries go digital and intelligent faster.
- Huawei Cloud envisions an ecosystem that is Of All, By All, and For All. We aggregate applications for numerous industries and empower developers and partners around the world. By the end of 2023, over six million developers and 40,000 partners were working with Huawei Cloud to jointly build a thriving ecosystem for innovation on the cloud.
Ecosystems
We openly collaborate with ecosystem partners and developers to create value and help others succeed
Increasing Ecosystem Investment to Help Partners Create Value
We are enabling ecosystem partners on all fronts, working together to drive shared success, and creating greater value for our customers. We have increased our support for ecosystem partners and invested tens of billions of yuan to stimulate application innovation based on Huawei's open capabilities. We are offering promotional support and sharing opportunities with ecosystem partners to help them achieve business success. By the end of 2023, we had worked with more than 46,000 ecosystem partners and developed more than 36,600 innovative applications together, accelerating innovation in industries like finance, energy, transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, and education.
Enabling Developers to Innovate and Grow by Sharing Experience, Opening Up Capabilities, and Enriching Development Tools
To help improve development efficiency, we provide comprehensive toolsets to support different scenarios, including hardware, application, AI, data, and digital content development. We are also working to cultivate and enable developers through various activities and competitions. In 2023, we held 7 flagship contests, over 30 themed summits, and over 1,000 online activities, reaching millions of developers worldwide. We also supported developer growth and innovation through programs like the Shining-Star Program, the OpenMind Program, and the Innovation Support Program. By the end of 2023, we had opened up more than 100,000 APIs and served over 9.5 million developers.
Helping Universities Cultivate Talent for Digital, Green, and Intelligent Transformation
Huawei has launched a variety of programs, including the 100 Seed Schools Program, the OpenHarmony Stars program, our updated business-academia talent development program, and the talent development acceleration program. We have released a total of 67 textbooks. Through our Intelligent Base 2.0 program, we have expanded the scope of our technical cooperation with universities. In 2023, Huawei held 77 training sessions in the information field, and engaged in competitions such as the China International College Students' Innovation Competition, the Huawei ICT Competition, and other innovation-oriented events, benefiting more than 4,600 teachers and over 500,000 students. These are part of our efforts to cultivate next-generation talent for the industry.
Cyber Security and Privacy Protection
Embrace changes, challenges, and opportunities
Over the past 30-plus years, Huawei has worked with carriers to build over 1,500 networks and help millions of enterprises go digital. During this time, we have connected over three billion people around the world and maintained a solid track record in security throughout. As digital transformation continues to pick up speed, we are acutely aware that cyber security and privacy protection will become key to business success in the future digital world. With this in mind, Huawei has continued to make cyber security and privacy protection a top priority. We strive to tackle both the challenges and opportunities this new age presents through management transformation, technological innovation, and open collaboration. We are committed to fostering a better life for all in the future digital world by offering secure and trustworthy products, solutions, and services, and by taking concrete steps to manage related risks in our supply chains. We also share our experiences and capabilities with our suppliers and partners so that we can strengthen cyber security and privacy protection capabilities together.
