When your revenue lines are cut off, what should a company do?

Well, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, founded and led by Ren Zhengfei, is turning to high-tech pig farming.

With COVID-19 sweeping the world and President Donald Trump imposing trade sanctions on Huawei, the Chinese company saw sales of phones fall by 42 per cent in the last quarter of 2020.

HUAWEI TO REDUCE NUMBERS OF SMARTPHONES MADE

According to reports, Huawei is set to reduce the number of smartphones it made last year by 60 per cent in 2021. In 2019, Huawei sold 240 million phones.

Huawei faces a big problem in being able to source components such as chips for 5G phones which are usually manufactured in the US. The US says Huawei poses a threat to its national security and is warning US companies not to supply Huawei with necessary components.

This now means that it will have to slow down its efforts to make advances in 5G and focus on 4G handset sales.

Rather than sit twiddling its thumbs, Huawei has gone into the huge pig farming industry in China and will be employing state-of-the-art techniques and technologies.

“The pig farming is yet another example of how we try to revitalise some traditional industries with ICT technologies to create more value for the industries in the 5G era,” said a Huawei spokesperson.

With China housing over 50 per cent of the world’s live pigs, Huawei has launched an artificial intelligence pig farming project which will also employ facial recognition technology.

In the opening months of 2020, Huawei was the biggest smartphone maker in the world, coming ahead of both Samsung and Apple.

Addressing the threat US and other international sanctions pose to Huawei’s sales numbers, a spokesperson said: “The issue here is not like there’s any problem with our quality or experiences of the Huawei products. It’s not a level playing field for Huawei as Huawei is caught in between the geopolitical tensions.”