Kommersant learned about the closure of Huawei’s corporate division in Russia

Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei decided to disband the unit from January 1 Huawei Enterprise, which has been operating in Russia since 2012 and was responsible for the supply of IT and telecom solutions to corporate customers, writes “Kommersant”.

This division was also previously responsible for deliveries to customers in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As wrote in November Vedomosti, Huawei decided to split the corporate unit in the Eurasia region into two parts. It was assumed that the Russian-Belarusian division would remain in Moscow, and the work of Huawei Enterprise in all other CIS countries would now be supervised by the vendor’s headquarters in Bahrain.

According to Kommersant, about 2,000 people worked in the Russian division, some of them were asked to transfer to the CIS countries, the majority will be fired, while the office will remain nominally, since the company is ready to return after the end of hostilities in Ukraine.

According to one of the sources of the publication, Huawei’s decision is associated with the risk of secondary sanctions, since the equipment supplied to it can be used in the public sector. The company will retain its research and development centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk, as well as its consumer electronics sales business.

With technical support, problems after the disbandment of Huawei Enterprise should not arise, according to experts interviewed by the publication, since it is produced by distributors who hired employees of foreign companies leaving the Russian Federation. However, it will become more difficult to buy equipment now, since “parallel imports cannot provide the necessary speed and assortment,” the first vice president of technology told the newspaper. MTS Pavel Voronin.

As wrote earlier than Vedomosti, the revenues of the entire Enterprise direction for 2021 amounted to 102.4 billion yuan (876 billion rubles), or 16.1% of the company’s total revenue. In the revenue of the Eurasia region, the share of Russia was about 70%, and the rest of the CIS countries accounted for no more than 30%. According to the CEO of Telecom Daily Denis Kuskov, the revenue of the Russian “daughter” Huawei Enterprise is approximately 115-130 billion rubles. excluding self-import.

Huawei start to redistribute Russian employees to work in the CIS countries from the spring of 2022. Then it was about “long business trips” of individual specialists to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This was due to the fact that the load on projects in Russia decreased, some contracts with local partners were suspended, and specialists “began to be more often involved in other countries that are part of the Eurasia region,” Vedomosti sources said.