Six months after the Trump administration dealt a crushing blow to Huawei Technologies Co.’s smartphone business, the Chinese telecommunications giant is turning to less glamorous alternatives that may eventually offset the decline of its biggest revenue contributor.
Among its newest customers is a fish farm in eastern China that’s twice the size of New York’s Central Park. The farm is covered with tens of thousands of solar panels outfitted with Huawei’s inverters to shield its fish from excessive sunlight while generating power. About 370 miles to the west in coal-rich Shanxi province, wireless sensors and cameras deep beneath the earth monitor oxygen levels and potential machine malfunctions in mine pit all supplied by the tech titan. And next month, a shiny new electric car featuring its lidar sensor will debut at China’s largest auto show.
China’s factory and retail sector activity surged in the first two months of the year, beating expectations, as the economy consolidated its brisk recovery from the coronavirus paralysis of early 2020.
While the impressive set of numbers released on Monday was heavily skewed by the very low base from last year’s significant slump, analysts said they nonetheless showed China’s strong rebound remained intact.
Industrial output rose 35.1 percent in the first two months from a year earlier, up from a 7.3 percent on-year uptick seen in December, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed, stronger than a median forecast for a 30 percent surge in a Reuters poll of analysts.
One year after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and a major threat, triggering the first round of economy-gutting lockdowns, the global economy is still very much in recovery mode and small business owners have borne the brunt of the downturn.
Small- and medium-sized enterprises account for 90 percent of businesses worldwide and 50 percent of global employment. But even before the coronavirus pandemic, many didn’t have the access to capital, credit and technical know-how that their bigger competitors did especially businesses owned by women and people of colour.
After COVID-19 was declared a national emergency in the United States in March 2020, states and cities passed a raft of stay-at-home orders that upended business and life as Americans knew it. While federal government help was promised, it didn’t always reach those who needed it most and often wasn’t enough to offset the financial blow from COVID-19.