America’s near monopoly on the world’s most profitable chip design businesses was under threat. This was more evidence that Huawei was successfully replicating what South Korea’s Samsung or Japan’s Sony had done decades earlier: learning to produce advanced technology, winning global markets, investing in R&D, and challenging America’s tech leaders. Moreover, Huawei seemed uniquely well placed for a new era of ubiquitous computing that would accompany the rollout of the next generation of telecom infrastructure: 5G.
