Huawei Shuts Down Less Popular Office App Link Now As It Scales Back Noncore Businesses In Fight For Survival

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Huawei Shuts Down Less Popular Office App Link Now As It Scales Back Noncore Businesses In Fight For Survival

Platforms such as Huawei's Zoom, which Link Now launched in the middle of the pandemic, stopped registering new users on October 16 and will end the service on December 16.
The tech giant backed off months ago after warning it would cut non-core businesses as it sought to avoid US sanctions.

Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co, which faces US sanctions, has shut down online collaboration app LinkNow two years after launching it, as the Shenzhen-based company moves to consolidate non-core businesses.

Huawei announced that as of October 16, Link Now will no longer accept user registrations "due to product strategy adjustments," according to a statement on the platform's website. The service will end on December 16 for all users

Link Now launched in the summer of 2020, when widespread lockdowns and work-from-home arrangements fueled demand for cloud services that facilitate remote work and learning. Like Zoom or Google Meet, Huawei's tools are primarily designed to host online meetings and classes with up to 300 participants and 50 video and audio users, according to the website.

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Link Now platforms, such as Huawei's Zoom, appear in China's Apple App Store on October 21, 2022. Photo: Handout

However, unlike many other similar tools, Link Now is completely free, never mature enough to charge business fees.

Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the LinkNow shutdown.

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In August, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei warned employees that the company would have to scale back or divest non-core businesses to survive, according to a leaked internal memo. The largest telecommunications equipment maker has struggled with declining revenue and profits after US sanctions nearly destroyed the company's mobile phone business and forced it to look for new sources of growth.

Huawei's revenue fell further in the first half of 2022, falling 5.9% year-on-year to 301.6 billion yuan ($44.7 billion). Its net profit margin fell to 5% from 9.8% in the same period last year. In 2021, the company's workforce fell by 2,000, the first decline since 2008.

Link Now was born out of China's highly competitive job application market, with Alibaba Group Holding's DingTalk, Tencent Holdings' Wecom and ByteDance's Feishu - known internationally as Lark - among the biggest players. The digital job market, worth more than 26.2 trillion yuan at the end of last year, is up for grabs, according to data analytics firm iiMedia Research.

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Alibaba's DingTalk said its user base reached 500 million last October, and the number of organizations using the service reached 19 million. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

WeCom Tencent registered 180 million active users and 10 million organizations in January. WeCom's relationship with business messaging platform WeChat has helped it reach 500 million of the app's 1.2 billion users.

Link Now is not Huawei's only desktop web platform. The company's flagship service is WeLink, which was launched in late 2019.

Huawei said last year that WeLink had added tens of thousands of enterprise customers and more than a million daily active users during the pandemic. However, it lags behind its two biggest rivals. DingTalk and WeCom are the number one and number two remote work tools in the country, according to market data firm Quest Mobile, behind Tencent Meeting and Fishoo.

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