Did a Chinese Hack Kill Nortel?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Their former university classmates (who also immigrated to Canada) are likely part of the 20 people that jumped ship to Huawei and implicitly may have leaked data before then.
I'm glad this article got through to them, that it isn't just politics and Huawei & the CCP really did go offside.
I'm sure the hack happened. I just don't think it would had made any material impact - there was simply not much to steal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was an insane place to get my first "office job" experience. Entire buildings of hundreds of people all working on powerpoint reports about potential training ideas for future projects to improve the production of the powerpoint presentations made to summarize the reports on internal "sales" numbers that are then filed without anyone reading them because everyone knew they were too fudged to matter and the internal competition thing was a smokescreen for fraud anyway. Who was embezzling what this week were conversations coop students got to overhear.
I was there shortly before the whole thing collapsed and right before it did, in my department, there was a lot of boat shopping combined with clock watching as they waited for options to vest before the whole thing fell apart (everyone knew it would soon).
It wasn't killed by spying Chinese communist; if anything it was killed by the flipside of our capitalist system. The "madness of crowds" that drives "hot" industries through periods of massive over-investment followed by massive under-investment.
This is one of the points of capitalism, Bad / wasteful decisions lead to failure. Better managed companies rise. Consumers get better products cheaper.
Far more likely, there's no shortage of other reasons that led to its downfall, but it's easier for the people responsible to blame spies.
Nortel without the IP theft was certainly on shaky ground.
It sounds like the IP gave Huawei an opportunity to catch up more quickly and with Chinese govt cash, pull the rug out from under Nortel.
I'll take this with a grain of salt. To this day Bloomberg still stands by its "The Big Hack" article (Supermicro, Amazon, and Apple being hacked with the tiny Chinese chip), containing claims that have been thoroughly refuted (and ridiculed) since then, and about which even their own sources were very incredulous. The CEO of Apple called it "100 percent a lie", which is a very harsh word in this context. Those were lower standards than the ones we're held to when commenting here on HN.
I don't know how that article came to be but such precedent puts their tech articles into serious question. Obviously such articles about major Chinese interference and hacks are great with the readers and get a lot of attention. But while the premise may be true (the Chinese hack most likely happened), the implications and the interpretation of the reporter are on shaky ground.
I don't have any further evidence but I'd say that Bloomberg may be pandering to the readers and giving them what they want to hear during these times. And if I were Bloomberg reporters Jordan Robertson or Michael Riley I'd say that even if my sources denied it.
It's a little hand-wavy I'll admit. The article makes accusations that they don't back up very well.
That said, I thought it was a decent attempt to be somewhat balanced.
VISA is an example of that. Reputation-based businesses (Think auditing firms) are another. Facebook is a third.
On the other hand, a vendor like Nortell did not have network lockin on their customers. They could, and did end up switching vendors.
I worked with lots of the big vendors over the years (I worked at a telcecom operator here in Canada), and you'd get to chatting and they were all under financial pressure internally, lots of layoffs. One time I was visiting one of the big vendors in the US, and our team was joking around how it felt like we were visiting a retirement home, it was like there was no one under 50 in the building (this was mid 2010's). Beers with other vendors, and they'd be talking about how there's an entire floor for like 5 employees and more layoffs coming down.
Because the company survived... doesn't mean it's alive and well.
And in my case it doesn't apply, the equipment we're evaluating was all software, running on a common x86 telecom platform. While I'm sure the office did have some embedded R&D, alot of what telecom vendors do just requires software developers.
As someone who lived it (being younger than young and older than most), the whole notion of young hardware (or software) engineers being somehow “better” stems from (IMNSHO) two factors: 1) their naivety in being willing to sacrifice personal life so they can be more “productive,” often at a lower cost of labor —-if you call that type of output “product” because: 2) tech had progressed slowly from the 1940s to the 1980s when micro-electronics began to democratize and challenge the established players making the financial benefits of (non-wartime) warp-speed innovation clear for the first time in history (previously, it was taught that the risks of fast innovation far exceeded any benefit), but highly skilled workers (101% of workforce) were slow to want to deviate from their established work paradigms or risk their mortgage on a dicey startup job even with VC backing. First Steve (Jobs), then Bill (Gates) began to have luck pairing these workers with, then managing them with and ultimately replacing them with kids that had way more talent than experience (a mistake that Steve did not repeat after the “classic” MacOS disaster and being fired —and that Bill “outgrew”).
I could go on for hours about this, but what you are seeing today (an industry filled with mostly young people) is not a result of “under 50” workers (as you put it) being better, indeed it is a market aberration (that you may not be able to realize from your perspective in The Matrix) that arose by the rank-in-file being forced out during the dot-com crash in 2000 and new college grads not commencing for more than half a decade later. Watching the industry (slowly) “come back” with future pear-shaped gurus has been one of the great satisfactions in my long career. (Who needs Star Trek timewarp plots?)
PS: BTW, I have over 40 years of experience and am not eligible for the senior menu at IHOP anytime soon —though being GenX, I am also holding a reference to a Promise that, by the time I get to that age, they will have changed the qualifying age! -and yeah, the older presenters at WWDC mostly creeped me out too —though it may just be that they are required to stay healthy and not pear-shaped by the AppleWatch team.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rank%20and%20file
I am not sure why this trend didn't translate towards hardware but if I were to guess - the jobs are fewer, the barriers of entry are higher (no one really teaches hardware design in school) and the cost of mistakes is bigger.
Also you might point out that the company pays bonuses to its "journalists" for successfully affecting financial markets. [2]
1: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...
2: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
The article makes a much stronger argument that effective Chinese government support of Huawei and the failure of the Canadian government to support Nortel, as well as Huawei's ability to hire away many of Nortel's top researchers, led to their success.
(The journalist's own summary of her article: "It turns out Canada really blew it." https://twitter.com/natalieobiko/status/1278366529591980032)
Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?
For an actual science based look at Nortel there was a good study done by a team at the Tefler School of Business years ago.[1] Taking an extensive look at the corporate culture and the state of the business which was despite dotcom evaluations in a pretty sorry state already. Tracing the decay back to the 80s and 90s and a whole row of disastrous decisions.
[1](https://obj.ca/article/nortels-failure-was-years-making-telf...)
You know the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. If you cut someone off while driving, it's just a simple error and no biggie, you just misjudged the road situation momentarily; but if someone cuts you off, they are a idiot who should not be on the road and deserves to get their license taken away and their car impounded.
The reaction to anything China on HN is like the above, applied at a national scale.
People also judge others by past behaviors.
Wrong or right, many Americans see China as an enemy. News is filtered through that light. And some news, like convictions about IP theft by Chinese (Xu at IBM, 3 individuals at Sinovel, etc, etc, etc), leave little room for debate. These stories color the ones which may or may not be nefarious like TikTok. Guilt by association.
But they are very selective in doing that. Even when the same actions are done in the same context they will use different measures for different people based on their sentiment toward them. And that just adds to the bias and fuels the cycle. As explained by this simple but accurate picture [0]. They see China and and their hackers as enemies. Do you think they see the NSA and by extension their own country as an enemy? Discarding (unwittingly) half of the context makes it a lot easier to assume they have the moral high ground.
Propaganda doesn't mean it's a lie, just that you take the same truth and shape it into an opinion for the people, depending on what you want to achieve. And it's a tool used by every superpower.
As a US citizen, reading HN for a year has downgraded me from being extremely patriotic, to considering my options if I get expelled from the country in the next 20 years on the basis of my ethnicity. These folks would cheer that on, and they're my neighbors.
I thought it more or less conspiracy theories or drama, not realizing it could be real.
Stupid me I guess
The article tries to paint the picture of a fantastic company but that was not the case. It was mismanaged (and the article provides some glaring examples, including fraud), slow, bloated, it was really struggling in the cellular space.
Even the account of the hack shows how badly Nortel handled it.
There's always the temptation to find an external scapegoat but the buck does stop with Nortel's management.
Too much bureaucracy, everything outsourced, management out of touch with anything, meetings after meetings... Hell, I remember two/three weeks of meetings to replace apache proxy with nginx. Actual replacement and configuration update would take a couple of minutes.
For those of us of Mediterranean decent, it would be as if the Roman Empire has been rebuilt and were expanding its influence globally. It would be hard for most people not to feel some element of subconscious or conscious pride.
The same feelings helped prop up the new Caliphate in the middle east recently (until it became obvious how brutal ISIS was).
Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Huawei hacks are the sideshow, the burning tire fire of management is the main act.
Your parents aren't the only ones burnt by Nortel. Lots of Nortel employees indulged with the paper gains of their stock, only for it to crater and created lots of financial strain.
But like most articles with a question as the title, the answer is typically no. This article, frankly, is trying so hard to rewrite history, to divert attention from the main act to the side show.
The definitive book on the collapse of Nortel is 100 Days: The Rush to Judgement that Killed Nortel by James Bagnall, a journalist for the Ottawa Citizen.
Occam’s razor applies here: the well documented fraud and bankruptcy at Worldcom and Global Crossing crushed Nortel. Overzealous regulators delivered the coup de grâce.
That book lays out to me a much more compelling case that a leap to conclusions in the early 2000's that some fraud must exist killed nortel. Based on reading that book it's probably fairer to say the Americans killed nortel than the Chinese did. Although like anything else, a simplified explanation when there are lots of contributing factors at play likely doesn't mean much.
The posted article though about Huawei killing nortel by hacking them appears to be a reach (can't say it doesn't contribute of course). As I recall working in the industry around the time Telus and Bell switched to UMTS and towards LTE, Nortel wasn't even in the running. I think they had already sold off their LTE technology and were holding onto some CDMA evolution. I don't have precise memory of how this all lined up though, and didn't really work on the access network side (which is where Huawei is used, so most of my knowledge towards Huawei is second hand). I only did an eval with Huawei once.
While I don't have any insight into the china development bank offering low interest loans, and I didn't see it come up at all in that book, I've worked with a number of people who used to be contracted out by nortel to build networks in other countries. And nortel was using it's own money to fund networks in countries unlikely to repay the money for the equipment (Haiti probably stands out with the wildest stories). Those were some of the internal war stories about the financial troubles, although I'm sure there was lots.
I don't think it's safe to say that Huawei hasn't benefited from IP theft, which may include theft from Nortel, and possibly other factors, that have allowed them to skyrocket in profitability and sales. The whole thing with Huawei / Cisco routers I believe is pretty well documented. I just don't agree with the posted articles premise, that China or Huawei are to blame or fully responsible for Nortels collapse.
Back then, Ottawa, not traditionally (or since) known for its glamour, seemed full of sports cars, corporate jets, and even society scandals featuring tech CEOs. In 1999 the co-founder of Corel Corp., who’d gotten his start at Nortel’s precursor company, threw a gala at which his wife showed up in a C$1 million leather bodysuit with an anatomically correct gold breastplate and a 15-carat-diamond nipple. “You were just surrounded by the most interesting and intelligent people that you could find anywhere in the world,” says Ken Bradley, who spent 30 years at Nortel, including as a chief procurement officer. “Nobody would ever tell me I couldn’t do something.”
I worked at Global Crossing in the late 90s and early 2000s as an engineer. I was a Primenet employee.
We got Huawei gear in to evaluate. Virtually everything they made was based on IP theft. Their routers literally had "Cisco Systems" strings all over the image files. It was blatant.
The PLA were constantly trying to break into our systems. We knew it. We talked about it. It wasn't a secret.
This is a difficult subject that I don't talk about with other people, in persona or otherwise. The conversation almost always quickly goes stupid in one of two ways: The person I'm talking to instantly goes nationalist one way or the other, or they just don't seem to have the IQ to grasp the issue. Having a rational conversation about the topic of what the US government and as private citizens/companies do about blatant Chinese aggression feels impossible.
As for online, the 50 Cent party quickly shows up en-mass with the typical FUD, bullying, distracting jokes, pearl clutching, and so on.
" Investigators ultimately found about $3 billion in revenue had been booked improperly in 1998, 1999, and 2000.
More than $2 billion was moved into later years, about $750 million was pushed forward beyond 2003 and about $250 million was wiped away completely.
The accounting scandal hurt both Nortel's reputation and finances, as Nortel spent an estimated US$400 million on outside auditors and management consultants to retrain staff.
On April 28, 2004 amidst the accounting scandal, three of Nortel's top lieutenants—Douglas Beatty, CEO Frank Dunn and Michael Gollogly—were fired for financial mismanagement.They were later charged with fraud by the RCMP.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also filed charges against them and four vice-presidents for civil fraud"
There are many other companies today, that are equally fraudulent.
If company A spent a trillion dollars coming up with the manufacturing process and formula to cure every cancer in the world. The intellectual property at it's root is the protection of that R&D investment. Company A than get's to setup manufacturing, and set pricing for the market, at the very least to recover the billion dollars investment.
If company B comes along, and spends 100 million dollars to steal that magic formula and the manufacturing process. Company B now has similar costs to setup manufacturing, but significantly less in R&D costs that need to be recovered, to sell to the same product to the same customers. In the contrived example, there is no reason to buy company A's product from their IP, when the same can be had from company B, presumably for less. Company B than earns a larger profit, which can be sunk into their own IP for the next generation, giving them a huge step up.
Of course the real world with tech products is way more messier than this, but in theory it's possible to do. As I posted elsewhere though, I don't believe it's fair to say it happened in the case with Nortel.
It looks like that the hack is the reason of the complete collapse of the company. But the article gives the following sentence without even reflecting on it:
<< Four days before Dunn was fired—fallout from an accounting scandal on his watch that forced the company to restate its financial results— >>
And, in my opinion, such a hack and the lack of action of Nortel after being informed of the hack are also symptoms of a defective organization.
This is probably an element of little value, but I knew some people that did work at Nortel in engineering and this is just my opinion but they were technically very very bad but they were convinced otherwise. From others I also got the feedback that the company was the kind of place where most people fake working.
Just to give you an example: around 2016, one of a former manager at Nortel that was now a high level executive in another company forced employees to work in a packed open space despite there being a lot of empty space on the same floor. Why? Because he knew better than anyone that software engineers are more productive in an open space... Despite recent studies and the opinion of the poor employees themselves. At the same time, the moving allowed him to get an individual closed room for himself...
Talk to anyone who had a job in the sector back then, they will you this.
All those engineers eventualy were reemployed in other industries such as software and that helped creating the boom that came there. But it also created an opening for the Chinese electronics industry to move into that area as they were cheap and willing to invest unlike us in the west.
The article says Huawei was given $10 billion or more in free or almost free loans.
They were willing to invest where we were no longer willing.
You can say that it is state capitalism and not free competition. But let there be no doubt; had there been free competition now and not a massive boycot led by the US government against Huawei, then Huawei would have been absolutely dominant.
1997: $16
1998: $22
1999: $105
2000: $283
2001: $56
2002: $26
The dot com bubble produced insane valuations around the turn of the century. The run-up to the collapse was breathtaking.
I have to laugh about it cuz I can't bear the alternative.
So it wasn't all sunshine and roses.
They would have been worth almost $200,000 at the peak of bitcoin's value, but I don't feel bad about it because there's no way I would have held them until that point. I mined them myself when they were worth like $12 each, and I definitely would have sold them when it hit $100.
Their decline and fall were the direct result of their human problems. And, briefly, their human problems stemmed from their human problems.
Culture and management matter.
To push another “China secretly hacked the west” story while also invoking Betteridge's Law leaves me highly skeptical.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Businessweek#%22The_... [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/bloomberg...
The big problem I have with the Bloomberg article, is it seems to really be trying to stretch the underlying information to draw the conclusion that Chinese Government or Chinese Hackers or Huawei are solely or the most responsible for the fall of Nortel.
Did Huawei benefit and get it's start from stolen IP is likely a compelling story to explore, with lots of compelling underlying facts. Does Huawei or China still do this, is probably another good question. To try and link these questions to the fall of nortel, while glossing over other massive contributors to nortel's fall leaves me skeptical of the narrative also.
It's disappointing, because I do believe there is plenty of compelling evidence around about Chinese IP theft, but reporting like this allows lots of noise to be mixed in, and for consumers of the information to reasonably be sceptical.
so it MUST be China!
> ...There were close to 800 of them: PowerPoint presentations from customer meetings, an analysis of a recent sales loss, design details for an American communications network. Others were technical, including source code...
powerpoint and some technical files
> relayed the PowerPoints and other sensitive files to an IP address registered to Shanghai Faxian Corp
powerpoint and some sensitive files again.
It's hard to believe Nortel had any 'edge' in 5G, and judging from other comments of first hand experiences here Nortel's failure has more to do with itself than anything else.
pathetic medium quality opinion piece
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Of course, that was the Russian agent disguised as a Chinese who did it.
I’m not saying that they had nothing to do with it (I don’t know), but it sounds a bit like hubris to me.
Also, who was supporting telecom in the old days? Bell Labs, AT&T, Lucent, etc? The government of course. Privatization happened and trade agreements with Europe meant the US and Canadian government can no longer support telcos and thus the downfall of all these companies at the time.. Even European ones like Alcatel, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens. This allowed the Asian telcos, not only the Chinese ones, but Korean ones like Samsung to take over.. (Of course the Chinese government and Korean governments were and are still heavily involved in them).
Nortel built bad routers. RIM created blackberries, the smartphones before smartphones were a thing.
https://money.cnn.com/2014/05/22/technology/security/nsa-oba...
Nortel's peak was $283 billion in 2000. Nortel was huge. Of course, the market was in a huge bubble at the time.
RIM peaked at $19.9 billion in sales in 2011. Amazingly they tripled in size from $6b in sales in 2008, in just three years. Then lost 85% of their sales in another four years after that.
I assume this is due to the advent of touchscreen phones. Around when people were getting used to the idea that mobile phones could be used for more than just making calls, touchscreens could be buggy/laggy and there wasn't haptic feedback or any sort of attempt at recreating the physical sensation of typing. RIM doubled down on physical keyboards, and Blackberrys had great ones (I could type much faster on my Blackberry Bold than on an iPhone at the time) and they already had productivity/utility apps and such since they were really PDAs. But the gradually improving touchscreen typing experience, combined with the increased utility of being able to put the keyboard away when you didn't need it, spelled the death of physical keyboard phones not long after.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/nortel-...
I guess Nortel didn't learn from that lesson and secure their network.
Documents the antics (and downfalls) of various hackers from the late 80s and early 90s, most of them Australian. Assange (aka Mendax) is one of the hackers the book follows.
It's out of print these days, but the author, Suelette Dreyfus made the book available online back in 2001 - http://underground-book.net/
Nortel primarily died from poorly conceived massive spending that fucked them during the dotcom/telecom bubble crash, executives started cooking the books, it was discovered, the company imploded. Don't get me wrong, Nortel was definitely the victim of industrial espionage, every telecom vendor in the world was being infiltrated by China at the time, CISCO, Siemens, Nokia, SonyEriccson, Acatel&Lucent etc. But they managed to survive or consolidate after the crash. Companies like Nortel don't implode that hard and fast from espionage - massive corporate incompetence and malfeasance however, will.
BTW Huawei itself didn't hack Nortel, the original reporting blamed Chinese state actors who then passed what they found onto other domestic players like Huawei and ZTE which was actually CPC's original domestic champion before US sanctions crippled them, after which Huawei took the crown. This point is salient, Huawei literally out competed the favourite child. Regardless, if memory serve the tech Huawei used from Nortel was related to optical routing which was a niche segment that wasn't a large part of Nortel's portfolio. So even if Huawei, who was a small player at the time, stole Nortel's tech and took the relevant market shares, it would not have killed or even crippled Nortel. There are entire books and lectures dissecting Nortel's demise, the role of Huawei is never seen as anything but tangential, and playing it up is basically revisionist history / propaganda.
Somewhat related, expat anecdotes of Nortel China in the late 90s - it was a shit place to work. Nortel Guangzhou drove away many of their talent (at least in engineering) because they wouldn't promote PRC nationals, and even Chinese Canadians. A lot of them ended up being poached by rivals or moved over to state enterprises, some with usb sticks full of data because Nortel fucked them. I knew a bunch of engineers with jumped shit with hard drives to Siemens and Lucent who later ended up at ZTE.
Edit: Also for anyone wondering why Bloomberg's reporting on China has shifted in the last few years even before the trade war (prior Bloomberg was a pretty ardent globalist, i.e. pro Chinese engagement like most of big business), this article from 4 years ago speculating Bloomberg was too pro-China and needed to cultivate anti-China bonafides if he wanted to run as president. Prescient.
Michael Bloomberg Has An Achilles Heel And It Is Not Guns Or Age But China https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2016/01/24/mich...
I’d much prefer this story was written by a news organization with some credibility.
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/chinese-win...
Why collect an interest rate at all, if it's less than the inflation rate? It's basically free money at that point.
Private companies cannot compete with governments. Governments, especially those with sovereign currencies, can do things that private companies simply cannot do and have pockets far deeper than any private company can ever hope to have. That's why China has won the global game. Everyone else is fielding their star players, sure, but China's star players are all on 'roids in the form of endless government backed credit and many other forms of state backing.
To see an American example, look at American dominance of aerospace. America has stealth fighters, probably a ton of secret stuff responsible for a good number of UFO reports, and rockets that land themselves because the US government backs promising aerospace companies generously. This has been the case since WWII. Lockheed Skunk Works is almost 100% government funded. SpaceX isn't entirely government funded but they've certainly benefited from NASA funding, NASA R&D handholding, and in the beginning got a transfer of IP related to NASA's previous research into low-cost rocket engines. Without all NASA's help I doubt they'd be where they are now.
China is doing this everywhere with everything.
Second favorite Nicholson quote, but so true.
Seriously, Boeing will internally deal with what happened. Need proof? Ever wonder what happened to say, Rockwell International (most famous for Apollo and Space Shuttle)? Yeah, you should’a bought Boeing at $30. ((Doh!))
Edit: Wow I’m even more glad I didn’t buy Boeing when it bought Rockwell. That’s 24 years of only 5.5% a year compounded.
Johnson had a 15th rule that he passed on by word of mouth. According to the book "Skunk Works" the 15th rule is: "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy.“ because the Navy wouldn’t relinquish control of projects to the Skunkworks.
And it’s “funding” was paid contracts for performance, not an infinite credit line of free cash that Huawei got. Entirely different things. Huawei has sucked up a huge amount of Chinese resources, and there is no guarantee they’ve made a positive return, or ever will.
And SpaceX is a great example, just like the Skunkworks it’s NASA funding was pay for performance. SpaceX would have been out if business without the first contract, and would not be remotely as big today without the others, but those contracts have also saved NASA billions of dollars.
The vast majority of government funded projects are similar to the SLS, which has eaten up $15B+ in taxpayer funds without a launch. And when it finally launches 4+ years late it will be the most expensive launch system ever by a factor of over 2x per launch, and at least 20 times more expensive per pound than commercial launch systems. While reusing 40 year old engines!
Government backed financing for equipment sales, and government procurement for defence or large projects ... these are activities are miles apart in terms of operational realities.
The Chinese government is involved to this day in financing Huawei customers. This is a big 'no no' for supposedly 'free trade' because it's a huge strategic advantage for any competitor wishing to completely dominate a market and flush out competitors.
The CCP controls their national commercial banks and controls the central bank - they can direct financing to happen directly for what they perceive to the benefit of the state and make no mistake this is a lot of firepower.
Imagine if the head of he Federal Reserve, and the head of Morgan Stanley were directed to make strategic loans to Cisco's customers at he behest of the President.
Cash-strapped Western companies, getting really sweet financing and credit terms and 'one stop one shop vendor' from Huawei is enough to really spook everyone.
Neither is it really a 'side show' issue - it's quite a fundamental thing. The financing is as important part of the equation as the product itself. Much like the financial terms on your car loan or mortgage are fundamental aspects of your terms of ownership.
I don't know, export finance is a tool used by many countries, the U.S included.
However, it's not the same thing.
Imagine if Trump Directed the Fed to print money to give to Chase Bank, to lend money to TMobile Germany to buy gear from Cisco. This would be incomprehensible to us.
So it's all a game, we need to play accordingly.
Simply because of unlimited support and funding from the China central government, in order to get independent technology Research and Development.
And plus, the financing for foreign countries, is also super important. There was talk about some African nations, only interested in buying Chinese products, simply because the Chinese provided favorable financing terms. Terms which the western countries refused to do.
In this case, the western countries wanted to make as much money as possible from one deal. Whereas China played the long game, and chose to make less money per deal, but had to strike a lot more deals, to make their money. So, China made their money in volume.
It seems there are different goals at play here.
The countries in the west, have their national champions, and their own governments support them at a holistic and policy level. And each company tries to compete with each other to win a bigger slice of the pie.
Whereas in China, their goal, is simply for technology independence from the west. So, they are willing to throw as much money at the problem as possible, in order to achieve that goal.
This also harkens back to the atomic bomb analogy. That once the technology was proven to be scientifically possible, then it can be independently achieve by a foreign government, if they put enough time, money, and people at solving the problem.
And here, it seems Huawei did just that.
I'm not saying this would be "good" or "bad". I imagine it would be bad for smaller companies, but good for larger ones, maybe good for American competitiveness in world commerce (for a while) but could be bad in the long run because we'd be committing to a race-to-the-bottom price war with a competitor who has a lower bottom price than we do.