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Huawei Technology Ltd., the world’s biggest maker of telecoms equipment, said its 2016 sales rose 32 percent from a year earlier but profit increased by only 0.4 percent due to higher spending on research and marketing. Huawei said it earned 37 billion yuan ($5.4 billion) on total revenue that rose 32 percent to 521.6 billion yuan ($75.6 billion).
Consumer sales, which includes Huawei’s smartphone brand, rose 44 percent to 179.8 billion yuan ($26 billion). Revenue for its carrier business rose 24 percent to 290.6 billion ($41.8 billion) while enterprise sales gained 47 percent to 40.7 billion ($5.9 billion).
Spending on research and development rose 28 percent to 76.4 billion yuan ($11 billion). Huawei has the biggest R&D budget of any Chinese company. Selling and administrative costs rose 38.8 percent to 86.4 billion yuan ($12.5 billion).
Huawei, headquartered in the southern city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, is the biggest maker of network gear used by telephone and Internet companies and the No. 3 smartphone brand behind Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Ltd.
Smartphone shipments rose 38.6 percent last year to 45.4 million, according to IDC, a research firm. It said Huawei has a 10.6 percent share of the global market, behind Apple at 18.3 percent and Samsung at 18.1 percent. Huawei is owned by its employees, with no publicly traded shares, but has reported financial results in recent years in an effort to allay security concerns in the United States and Europe.