Huawei Australia replaces 'best-ever' CEO

Huawei Australia has posted record results, and appointed a new CEO to replace George Huang.

The two announcements may seem incongruous – why appoint a new leader after revenue hit $735 million, an 18 percent year-on-year increase?

We’re told that Huawei likes to rotate its senior leaders every two or three years, that Huang’s time was up and that perhaps his Australian success has him marked for another gig.

The new Australian CEO is Haosheng (Hudson) Liu, a 21-year Huawei veteran who previously served as deputy managing director at Huawei Germany, CEO of Huawei Belgium and most recently as CEO of Huawei Indonesia.

The company’s Australian chairman John Lord said Liu “drove incredible growth, led Huawei’s telecommunications modernisation and digital transformation projects. The board and I look forward to working with Hudson to help continue Huawei’s ongoing success in Australia.”

Huawei’s announcement was laced with direct and subtle remarks about its governmental travails.

Lord hailed the results but added “It’s fair to say we had a challenging year on the political front, but our Australian customers valued and trusted our world leading technology and purchased it in record numbers.”

Liu has already weighed in, too, taking to Twitter on Monday to suggest that Australia’s performance on global broadband league tables would be better if it were allowed to play in 5G.

I hope we could learn something from this.
Free, fair, open market competition will improve the efficiency and accelerate the innovation. https://t.co/pf8azcKY3L

— Hudson LIU (@HudsonLIU) April 28, 2019

Huawei didn’t detail exactly what drove its business last year, but did offer three highlights:

• Carrier business grew 20 percent year-on-year, “on the back of strong network investment from Optus and Vodafone”;
• Enterprise business sales grew 19 percent year-on-year, “spurred” by the $136m win to provide a closed 4G network for Perth’s metro rail system – the mention of which calls out that Huawei has been trusted for a mission-critical sensitive network;
• “Strong growth in high-end smartphones” led to 20 percent growth in consumer sales.

Lord also mentioned Huawei will continue to push itself as “a leading IT alternative”, another signal that it’s ramping up its servers, storage and LAN business.