Under fire Chinese equipment vendor Huawei lined up CNY2 billion ($285 million) in bonuses for employees who helped mitigate the impact of a ban on doing business with US companies, South China Morning Post reported.

In addition to paying the bonus to most of its 190,000 staff, the newspaper said Huawei will also double each employee’s monthly salary when it makes the next payments on 15 November.

The announcement comes six months after the US put the company on a trade blacklist.

Ren Zhengfei, Huawei founder and CEO, last week expressed confidence in its future growth prospects even if the US moves ahead with trade restrictions.

He said the sanctions “taught us a lesson and reminded us we can’t be complacent, and that we must work hard. After we doubled our efforts, we eventually found that our revenue and profits grew more than we had expected”.

In the first half of 2019, the company experienced rapid growth and, even after the US measures were implemented, Ren said it was able to set a solid foundation for the future. However, he acknowledged the true impact of the sanctions would likely be more heavily felt in 2020.

Revenue in the third quarter increased 24.5 per cent year-on-year to CNY610.8 billion with a net profit margin of 8.7 per cent. The company does not provide profit or loss figures in its interim reports.

Huawei is working to find alternative sources of components and build its own suite of software and apps for device platform HarmonyOS.