U.S. trade restrictions will lower Huawei’s smartphone revenues by about $10 billion this year, the firm reported. But that is much less than it originally expected.

Huawei originally projected that the trade restrictions would lower its smartphone revenues by about $30 billion.

“It seems it is going to be a little less than that,” Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu said this week at a news conference, noting that its smartphone business is doing “much better” than originally expected. “You have to wait until our results in March … But a (sales) reduction of more than $10 billion could happen.”

Huawei’s smartphone business had been exploding before the U.S. government got in the way: It generated about $50 billion in revenues in 2018, half of the firm’s overall revenues, and over $31 billion in the first half of 2019. Huawei, the second-biggest maker of smartphones worldwide, had expected to overtake Samsung in the top spot by the end of 2019.

Now, of course, that won’t happen. Huawei will need at least another year to recover from the impact of the U.S./China trade war and its evidence-free blacklisting by the U.S. government.

Helping matters, Huawei’s sales in China have surged since the U.S. blacklisting in a wave of patriotic support for the company. Sales in China are up over 30 percent, year over year, thanks to the U.S. action.

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