Unlike most wireless infrastructure vendors, Huawei says it is thriving. In unaudited financial results, Huawei claimed its sales hit $21.5 billion in 2009.
Though the numbers are preliminary and do not contain details about net income or gross margins, they seem to indicate that Huawei has managed to grow in an industry which is shrinking as a whole. Huawei's formal results will be released in April.
The Chinese vendor has landed a number of international contracts, including a major coup over Ericsson with its deal to provide LTE infrastructure and modems for Swedish operator Net4Mobility, a joint venture between Tele2 and Telenor.
Huawei is also involved in the 4G buildouts of other operators, including Telenor, TeliaSonera and Clearwire.
An ABI Research report from spring 2009 found that the network infrastructure market would shrink by about 6 percent over the course of the year, causing many of Huawei's incumbent rivals to struggle.