Huawei confirmed a strong growth in profit for 2014 in its audited results, with Ken Hu, rotating CEO, stating that “with heavy investment in innovations in areas such as cloud computing, big data, 5G, SDN and NFV, we believe we are well positioned to capture the tremendous business opportunities in this digital transformation era”.

The report, audited by KPMG, showed group net profit was CNY27.9 billion ($4.5 billion), up 32.7 per cent, on revenue of CNY288.2 billion, up 20.6 per cent.

The company’s Carrier Business Group saw revenue increase by 16.4 per cent to CNY192.1 billion, with a “strong contribution from mobile broadband network rollouts around the world”.

It noted that as a result of TDD network construction, the operator networks unit saw a 22 per cent increase in revenue from its home market.

Huawei’s Consumer Business Group saw revenue increase by 32.6 per cent to CNY75.1 billion, “thanks to growing consumer demand for smartphones and particularly strong growth in emerging markets”.

It also said that during the year, it invested CNY40.8 billion in R&D, a “significant increase” of 29.4 per cent year-on-year. This represented 14.2 per cent of 2014 revenue.

“As 2015 unfolds, ICT technologies, notably broadband, cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT), are becoming the engines that drive transformations in many industries,” Hu continued.

In line with its policy of rotating CEOs, the company said that from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2015, the role will be filled by Eric Xu.