Huawei Technologies said its sales last year gained 8 percent. Main growth drivers included devices and capital spending (Capex) in wireless equipment by Chinese telecom operators.
Its earlier sales target was 10-12 percent growth.
Huawei said its sales increased to between 238 billion yuan ($39.4 billion) and 240 billion yuan, Bloomberg reported. Operating profit is likely to increase 40 percent to between 28.6 billion yuan and 29.4 billion yuan ($4.87 billion).
Huawei is benefiting from China’s accelerating shift to 4G LTE wireless service. Regulators last month gave licenses for commercial 4G service to the nation’s three state-owned carriers, including China Mobile.
China Mobile had started rolling out a nationwide trial network last year, which the carrier said in March would boost 2013 capital spending to 190.2 billion yuan.
In January last year Huawei said that its sales may rise 10 percent to 12 percent from 220 billion yuan.
Huawei was the world’s No. 3 smartphone vendor in the quarter ended September with 4.8 percent of shipments, trailing Samsung Electronics and Apple, market researcher IDC said in October.
The performance indicates that accusations of cyber-espionage did not affect the Chinese telecom vendor, which competes with Ericsson, NSN, Alcatel-Lucent, ZTE, Cisco, Samsung, etc.
Huawei, the world’s No.2 telecom equipment maker, has had a turbulent year in which it was shut out of multi-billion dollar network opportunities in the United States and Australia and drew the scrutiny of British authorities over cyber security issues, Reuters reported.
Huawei said smartphone shipments reached 52 million units worldwide last year compared with the company’s 60 million unit target.
Huawei was the third-largest smartphone maker globally in the third quarter of 2013, according to Strategy Analytics, with a 5.1 percent market share. However, the company is dwarfed by Samsung and Apple, which have a 35.2 percent and 13.4 percent share respectively.
