4 ms·

I don't know the details of Nortel, but I saw Ericsson post dot-com bubble from the inside, and that company was being stripped of anything of value, right down

I don't know the details of Nortel, but I saw Ericsson post dot-com bubble from the inside, and that company was being stripped of anything of value, right down to cancelling cleaning and free fruits in the office over outsourcing everything to the cheapest bidder. The rise of ZTE and Huawei comes much later (around the introduction of 4G - they start winning contracts in Scandinavia), and to me mostly because they were willing to invest in research at a time when western companies were not.

Lio 5y ago
I'm not sure about that time line. I can remember BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Huawei, from nowhere, suddenly had very cheap networking products. So cheap they effectively killed Marconi's bid. It was an open joke at the time that they were copies of Cisco products (the other winning supplier) down to the bugs. No one cared because they were so cheap. Personally, I blame BT's executives for not seeing the value in keeping a local manufacturer (just up the road) as one of their suppliers.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  Huawei had almost no overseas revenue until 2004.[1] Nortel's collapse was well before that. By 2001, the were already headlines like this: "The story behind Nortel's fall."[2] 1. https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20200227162907806-0552:9781108550987:42643fig7_1.png https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge... 2. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story-behind-nortels-fall/article20935077/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story...
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  They might had delivered some network equipment of modest importance (in the period 2005-2010), I was referring to when they started becoming prime contractors.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  > BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Just looked this up: Huawei was selected by BT in 2005. That's already about 4 years after Nortel's initial collapse, and a year after the SEC began investigating Nortel for financial fraud. Again, this illustrates how blaming Huawei for Nortel's fall doesn't make chronological sense.

Lio 5y ago

I'm not sure about that time line. I can remember BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Huawei, from nowhere, suddenly had very cheap networking products. So cheap they effectively killed Marconi's bid. It was an open joke at the time that they were copies of Cisco products (the other winning supplier) down to the bugs. No one cared because they were so cheap. Personally, I blame BT's executives for not seeing the value in keeping a local manufacturer (just up the road) as one of their suppliers.

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
Huawei had almost no overseas revenue until 2004.[1] Nortel's collapse was well before that. By 2001, the were already headlines like this: "The story behind Nortel's fall."[2] 1. https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20200227162907806-0552:9781108550987:42643fig7_1.png https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge... 2. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story-behind-nortels-fall/article20935077/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-story...
throwaway4good 5y ago
They might had delivered some network equipment of modest importance (in the period 2005-2010), I was referring to when they started becoming prime contractors.
DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
> BT replacing Marconi with Huawei backbone routers for its 21CN project, that was early 00s. Just looked this up: Huawei was selected by BT in 2005. That's already about 4 years after Nortel's initial collapse, and a year after the SEC began investigating Nortel for financial fraud. Again, this illustrates how blaming Huawei for Nortel's fall doesn't make chronological sense.