Chinese networking giant Huawei has revealed that growth was stronger in its non-core operations in 2014, contributing to year-on-year revenue growth of almost 20%.

While revenues at Huawei’s core Carrier Network business increased annually by 15%, its Enterprise business, which is currently investing in cloud computing and big data, grew by 27% and its consumer business, which includes the Ascend smartphones, grew by 32%, citing developing markets as experiencing especially strong growth.

Announcing unaudited 2014 revenues of around $46.5 billion, with profits of $5.5 billion, CFO Meng Wanzhou positioned Huawei as a broad-based ICT company. “By 2025, the number of connections around the world is expected to exceed 100 billion with connectivity becoming ubiquitous, much like air and water,” said Ms. Meng.

“Ubiquitous connectivity and big data will drive a new industrial revolution in intelligent technology, propelling the modernization of traditional industries, and reshaping today’s industries and business landscape. The focus of industrial innovation will migrate from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet.”

Huawei’s R&D spend was up 28% annually and it claimed it has submitted 546 proposals for LTE core standards to 3GPP, accounting for nearly 25% of the world’s total. Huawei’s quest for international brand recognition also featured with the acknowledgement of it making it onto Interbrand’s Top 100 Best Global Brands list – the first Chinese company to do so.

“The core values of ‘being customer-centric, making dedicated employees the foundation of our success, and our overall commitment to dedication’ have been the cornerstones of Huawei’s growth over the past 20-plus years,” said Ms. Meng. “Huawei will continue to follow and embed these core values across the organization over the next decade to help us become the leader in the ICT industry.”

The challenge for Huawei this year and after is to maintain this kind of growth once it has exhausted the low-hanging fruit, such as price-sensitive networking and smartphone markets, and to continue to expand internationally and diversify its ICT offering.