Huawei’s Profit More than Doubles in 2023, Sales up 9.6% As Cloud and Digital Businesses Grow

A customer carries his purchased Huawei product outside a Huawei store after he attended the Huawei new product launch conference in Beijing, on Sept. 25, 2023. (AP)
A customer carries his purchased Huawei product outside a Huawei store after he attended the Huawei new product launch conference in Beijing, on Sept. 25, 2023. (AP)
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Huawei’s Profit More than Doubles in 2023, Sales up 9.6% As Cloud and Digital Businesses Grow

A customer carries his purchased Huawei product outside a Huawei store after he attended the Huawei new product launch conference in Beijing, on Sept. 25, 2023. (AP)
A customer carries his purchased Huawei product outside a Huawei store after he attended the Huawei new product launch conference in Beijing, on Sept. 25, 2023. (AP)

Chinese telecoms gear company Huawei Technologies has reported its profit more than doubled last year as its cloud and digital businesses thrived in spite of US sanctions.

The Shenzhen-based company reported a net profit of 87 billion yuan ($12 billion), helped by strong sales and an improved product portfolio. Revenue jumped nearly 10% from a year earlier, to 704.2 billion yuan ($97.4 billion).

Huawei’s rotating chairman Ken Hu said the company’s figures were in line with forecasts.

“We’ve been through a lot over the past few years. But through one challenge after another, we’ve managed to grow,” Hu said.

Huawei also said it profited from “gains from the sales of some businesses.” It did not specify which businesses were sold.

Huawei, one of China’s first global tech brands, has been caught up in China-US tensions over technology and security.

The US has banned US companies from doing business with Huawei, cutting off its access to computer chips and software such as Google services for its smartphones and preventing it from selling its telecommunications gear to US customers.

Washington says Huawei poses a threat to US national security. Huawei denies that.

Huawei has refocused its business on cloud computing services and helping industries to shift to more digital operations.

Revenues from its cloud computing business grew almost 22% year-on-year in 2023 to 55.3 billion yuan ($7.7 billion). Sales for its digital power business grew 3.5%. Its automotive services related sales more than doubled.

Huawei’s consumer unit, which sells smartphones and other devices, posted a 17.3% jump in revenue in 2023.

Last year, Huawei launched its high-end Mate 60 smartphone line, powered by an advanced chip that it made together with China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

“In 2024, we will further expand our presence in the high-end market by working with ecosystem partners worldwide to bring more innovative products and services to consumers across the globe,” the company said in a statement to the AP.

The launch of the Mate 60 prompted speculation that Huawei and China may be able to produce 5G chips.

US lawmakers later accused SMIC of violating US sanctions by supplying chips to Huawei. Taiwan also launched an investigation into four local companies over reports that they helped Huawei in its chip efforts. Some of the companies said they were offering wastewater and environmental protection services unrelated to critical technology.

Huawei is one of the world’s biggest spenders in research and development. In 2023, it invested 164.7 billion yuan ($22.8 billion) into R&D, accounting for almost a quarter of its annual revenue. Just over half of Huawei’s 207,000 employees work in R&D.



Musk Launches ‘Scary Smart’ AI Chatbot 

The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
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Musk Launches ‘Scary Smart’ AI Chatbot 

The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)
The xAI Grok logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. (Reuters)

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company unveiled on Monday the latest version of its chatbot, Grok 3, which the billionaire hopes will find traction in a highly competitive sector contested by the likes of ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek.

The launch comes as the world's richest man is deploying the enormous powers granted him by US President Donald Trump to restructure and dismantle federal agencies.

The unprecedented cost-cutting drive has raised conflict-of-interest questions, given that many of those agencies have regulatory oversight on elements of Musk's sprawling business empire.

"Grok is to understand the universe," Musk said at the start of the Grok 3 launch presentation.

"We're driven by curiosity about the nature of the universe -- that's also what causes us to be a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct."

Musk has promoted Grok 3 as "scary smart," with 10 times the computational resources of its predecessor that was released in August last year.

The flagship product of his xAI company was trained on synthetic data and employs self-correction mechanisms that avoid errors -- known as "hallucinations" -- that plague some AI chatbots and lead them to process false or misleading data as fact.

"Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we've done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that's been released, that we're aware of, so that's a good sign," Musk said in a video call last week with the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

Grok 3 will be made available first to Premium+ paid subscribers of X -- formerly Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022 -- before rolling out to other users.

The upgraded chatbot enters a crowded field with countries racing to introduce more sophisticated -- and cost-effective -- AI products.

Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the global AI industry last month with the launch of its low-cost, high-quality R1 chatbot -- a direct challenge to US ambitions to lead the world in developing the technology.

Grok 3 is also going up against OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT - pitting Musk against collaborator-turned-arch rival Sam Altman.

Musk and Altman were among the 11-person team that founded OpenAI in 2015. Created as a counterweight to Google's dominance in artificial intelligence, the project got its initial funding from Musk, who invested $45 million to get it started.

Musk left three years later, and then in 2022 OpenAI's release of ChatGPT created a global technology sensation -- one that did not feature Musk at its center and which made Altman a star.

Their relationship has become increasingly toxic and litigious ever since, with Open AI's board last week rejecting a Musk-led offer to buy out the company for close to $100 billion.

- Trump and tech -

Trump has put technology front and center of his new administration. Tech billionaires featured prominently at his inauguration and he has announced a number of major AI infrastructure initiatives from the White House.

Musk has become a key figure in the administration, as one of Trump's closest advisers and the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has begun a radical overhaul of the US government bureaucracy.

Critics warn that Musk's proximity to the president poses a major conflict of interest as he guides Trump on laws and regulations around artificial intelligence -- just one sector in which he has a substantial commercial stake.

According to Bloomberg, xAI has been canvassing potential investors for a roughly $10 billion funding round that would value the company at about $75 billion.

Musk, who also acts as boss of SpaceX and Tesla, launched the xAI company in July 2023, shortly after he signed an open letter calling for a pause in the development of powerful AI models.