Huawei Link Now

2022: Service closure

In mid-October 2022, the Chinese company Huawei, struggling due to US sanctions, announced the closure of its Link Now collaboration service two years after its launch.

Huawei announced that from October 16, 2022, the Link Now project no longer accepts new users due to an adjustment to the product strategy, according to a notice on the platform's website. The service will end for all users on December 16, 2022.

Huawei closes Link Now service

Link Now was launched in the summer of 2020, when widespread power outages and work from home led to a surge in demand for cloud services that make it easier to work remotely and learn. Similar to Zoom or Google Meet, Huawei's tool was designed primarily for online meetings and classes with up to 300 participants and 50 simultaneous users of video and audio functions. However, unlike many such tools, Link Now was completely free and did not reach the corporate level.

In August 2022, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei warned employees that to survive, the company would have to scale back or abandon non-core businesses, according to a leaked internal memo. The world's largest telecom equipment maker is struggling with declining revenues and profits following U.S. sanctions that all but wiped out the company's once lucrative smartphone business and forced it to look for new sources of growth.

Link Now for October 2022 is not Huawei's only online office platform. The company's main service is WeLink, which was launched at the end of 2019, and in 2021 the service served hundreds of thousands of corporate clients and more than 1 million daily active users during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[1]

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