Chipmaker Wuhan blames falling sales on pandemic, US' 'crazy suppression' of Chinese tech

SHANGHAI: China's Wuhan P&S Information Technology Co Ltd on Tuesday blamed COVID-19 and the "crazy suppression" of the Chinese technology sector by the US government for a sharp drop in its sales last year.

The remarks are an unusually open admission of the stress China's electric component sector has been under in the past year after the US government barred firms reliant on US origin technology from selling to Huawei Technologies Co Ltd .

Revenue for the company's CMOS sensor parts division, which sells to Sony Corp and subsequently to Huawei and other brands, fell from 8 billion yuan ($1.2 billion) in 2019 to 5 billion yuan in 2020, the company said in an outlook preceding its full results statement.

"Due to the influence of the epidemic as well as the US government starting a new round of crazy suppression against China's high tech sector, the company's most important market, the smartphone markets structure endured big changes," the company said.

That caused its sales to the smartphone industry to drop sharply, it said.

"As the epidemic spread throughout the U.S and the Trump administration continued to upgrade its pressure on Huawei to the point of a complete block, our indirect to sales to Huawei also gradually declined," it added.

Sales of its components related to internet-of-things devices - which link together over an internet connection - also suffered, the company added, as the epidemic caused an economic downturn.

The measures announced by the US caused Huawei to sell off its Honor brand of mid-range phones last year.

Reuters reported this week that Huawei was in talks to sell two of its high-end lines of phones to a branch of the Shanghai government. A Huawei spokesman has denied the report.