Huawei’s chairman Eric Xu warned the US government against its anti-Huawei measures when he presented the company’s annual report earlier today.

“The Chinese government will not just stand by and watch Huawei be slaughtered on the chopping board,” said Xu, “why wouldn’t the Chinese government ban the use of 5G chips or 5G chip-powered base stations, smartphones and other smart devices provided by American companies, for cybersecurity reasons?”

Xu referred to the most recent threat by Washington that companies using US-manufactured chip manufacturing equipment would have to seek permission from the US government to sell chips to Huawei.

“Even if this situation happened, Huawei and also other Chinese companies can choose to buy chipsets from Samsung from Korea, MTK from Taiwan, and in China, and use those companies to develop chips,” said Xu.

Samsung uses US-made chip manufacturing equipment and Mediatek has its chips made by TSMC which also uses US-made equipment, while TSMC also makes the chips for Huawei’s chip design subsidiary HiSilicon.

So it is not clear how Huawei will remain unaffected by the US ban, if it is imposed.

Huawei said net profit for 2019 was 5.6% up on 2018 at  $8.9 billion which was its weakest profits growth in three years. In 2018 it grew profit by 25%.

Huawei’s switchgear business increased sales by 3.8%.

Group sales were up 19% at $120, helped by a 34% jump in sales for its consumer business unit, which includes smartphones.

That was mainly driven by sales in China which rose 36.2% to $71 billion. Last year Huawei increased its smartphone market share in China from 27% in 2018 to 38.5% in 2019 – driven by patriotic purchases in the face of US restrictions.

Revenue from  Asia-Pac, excluding China, fell 13.9% while EMEA sales grew 0.7%.

Huawei spent 15.3% of its 2019 revenue – $18.6 billion – on R&D.