| HN Mirror

that is true but Huawei isn't just consumer products. Their radio and core network products absolutely suck. Their O&M plane is a disaster no NOC wants to put up with. And their Huawei cloud offering that positions itself as a carrier-grade cloud is worse than digital ocean. Operators choose Huawei because it's cheap not because their features and interoperability and acceptance tests were of better quality then another vendor. They're able to compete below price precisely because they are heavily government funded, and because they stole a lot of IP from the established players and could leapfrog many years of innovation done for them by competitors. Ericsson, Nokia have seen this coming long ago which lead to all these M&A's (starting in the late 90ies till just recently). The only players left now are Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei & ZTE. It doesn't look good for Nokia & Ericsson considering how lazy and half-arsed their presence is in standardization activities and how much of it is actually driven by CENELEC (the Chinese standards-compliance arm of ETSI).

As for consumer products, yes of course they will have to get their money back somewhere. If you're running on one end a shady operation that is to cut the price to levels nobody can compete with and deliver shitty products only developing countries or banana republics want to afford, ... then you need to make up for this somewhere else in order not to expose the whole racket.