Amidst falling sales and growing fears among customers about US sanctions on its parent, Huawei, Chinese smartphone vendor, Honor, has started cutting hundreds of jobs in India. According to a source quoted by ET, the company is scaling down its operations in the country because of a precipitous drop in sales ever since the US imposed sanctions on the company earlier this year.
According to the anonymous source, “… operations are being scaled down and services of those employees are no longer required. There is downsizing due to a drop in sales”. Huawei is said to employ around 6,000 people in India, although, it’s not immediately clear as to how many of them will be affected by the downsizing. The impacted employees, however, are said to include both in-house staff as well as contract workers.
The job cuts, unfortunately, aren’t restricted to India. According to the AFP, Huawei is also cutting more than 600 jobs at the company’s US-based research and development arm, Futurewei Technologies. In a press release, the company said that the layoffs are the result of “curtailment of business operations” following US sanctions on the company and 68 of its subsidiaries.
Even as the US-China trade tensions eased somewhat over the past month, Huawei continues to work on its new operating system, HongMeng OS, although the company reiterated last week that contrary to recent media reports, the new software is not meant to be an Android alternative. Alongside HongMeng, the company is also working on yet another operating system called ‘Harmony OS’ for smartphones and computers.
