The Chinese telecoms giant, Huawei, announced on Friday a sharp decline of 69 percent in its net profits last year, especially due to US sanctions that significantly weakened its phone sales.

At the same time, the group announced in a statement Friday that its CFO, Ming Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei's founder, will take over the company's rotating presidency from Saturday for a period of six months.

And Wanzhou was arrested in Canada in 2018 at the request of the United States, which led to a major diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Ottawa, with the arrest of two Canadians accused of espionage in China.

In an atmosphere of competition with China in the technology sector, the administration of former US President Donald Trump blacklisted Huawei in 2019.

The measure bars US companies from selling the group sensitive technologies, including microprocessors. The current administration of Joe Biden has not changed this policy.

The sanctions cut Huawei off from global supply chains for components as well as from Google's Android operating system, which is found in most smartphones in the world.

This situation led to a significant weakening of the Huawei phone branch in recent years, which in 2020 separated from its first brand, Honor.

In this context, Huawei announced on Friday that its net profit decreased by about 69 percent year on year during 2022.
The group achieved profits of 35.6 billion yuan (4.7 billion euros) in 2022, compared to 113.7 billion yuan in 2021, when it recorded its best historical performance.

On the other hand, the group's sales increased slightly in one year (+0.9 percent) and amounted to 642.3 billion yuan (85.8 billion euros). And it had decreased in 2021 by more than 28 percent.

"In 2022, difficult business conditions and non-market factors continue to affect Huawei's business," Eric Xu, Chairman of Huawei's Board of Directors, said in a statement, without explicitly referring to the sanctions.

Huawei was one of the three largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, along with the Korean Samsung and the American Apple. It held the top spot for a brief period, helped by demand in China and sales in emerging markets.

Huawei did not disclose details of the number of mobile phones it sold last year.

The company is not listed on the stock exchange, so it is not subject to the same obligations to certify accounts or details in publishing its results.

Huawei is also the world's leading provider of 5G equipment. But Washington pressured its allies to abandon it to equip their own 5G networks, arguing that Beijing could use Huawei to monitor state communications and data traffic.

The company is now focusing again on the Chinese market and diversifying its activities, particularly in cloud computing, connected cars and chip design.

The Huawei Group is headquartered in Shenzhen, in southern China, and has about 207,000 employees, with centers in more than 170 countries.