Dave in South China Morning Post: China is already a leader in telecom
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- Published: 08 June 2018 08 June 2018
Fifteen years ago, a brilliant French switch engineer claimed, "The Chinese can never do what we do." I looked at him and replied, "B_______. Hundreds of Asians worked in Bell Labs. Do you think their cousins back home are not as smart as they are?" His company is long gone. Two of the five leading telecom manufacturers are Chinese, one Korean, one Swedish, and one Finnish. No company in France - or the United States - can deliver a major mobile network.
An SCMP article covered the long march still ahead to match Intel processors. That's not true in telecom. Qualcomm still probably makes the best mobile chips, but Huawei's HiSilicon is very close. Know-nothings in D.C. thought ZTE was dependent on America and made bad policy.
90% of the ZTE components could be immediately sourced today in Asia. The remaining few, mostly RF and FPGA, are actively being researched in China and could be quickly developed.
Xavi is riding to the rescue after Free lost 19,000 broadband subscribers in Q1, an almost inconceivable result after 16 years of success. He's bringing back some of the original team, including legendary engineer Rani Assaf. They have work to do: opening Italy & Ireland, transitioning from 4G to ?, and dealing with invigorated competitors. Even Bouygues seems to be coming back. 
Update: May 13: Trump blinked. He tweeted, "Too many jobs in China lost,. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!" Previous: The maximum cost to keep the company going for two years would be about $10B if they didn't sell a single product. With some fast engineering work and smart management, the survival would cost less than $5B. 
May 3 John Legere took a dangerous gamble basing his campaign for T-Mobile-Sprint on a falsehood, that the deal would deliver much faster 5G, sooner, and that would produce $billions in social gains. I immediately knew his claims were bogus. 
Goldman & Antin just bought CityFibre for $750M, a rich price. Fiber is back, bigtime. Pension funds and others want long term investments they believe will have a regular return. CityFibre has a deal with Vodafone to build fiber to 1M homes. (Below) With the new investors, CityFibre plans 5M homes. They expect costs under $1,000/home. probably well under.
Charter fell 12% on April 27th, despite a buy rating from one of the very best on Wall Street. He had a sell on Sprint, which went up 8%. If the best in the business can be so wrong, should you be picking stocks? The average of all hedge funds many years does worse than the S & P. You literally would have done better with a flight of darts.