Like Huawei, ZTE is also located in Shenzhen, Guangdong, and its business scope basically overlaps. However, unlike Huawei, ZTE is a listed company with state-owned capital holdings. The biggest difference between them is the corporate culture. In Chinese business management courses, both of them are typical cases of corporate culture. Huawei is a wolf and ZTE is a bear. This can also be seen in the response to US sanctions.
ZTE was founded in 1985, and by 2019, ZTE achieved revenue of 13 billion U.S. dollars. The proportions of the company’s three major businesses are:Operator network (54%), terminal (29%), telecommunications (17%).
The gap between ZTE and Huawei in the traditional optical fiber communications industry is not big, but in recent years, Huawei has greatly separated the ZTE by its mobile phone business and 5G business. In the current metropolitan area network and backbone network, the core equipment OLT is basically monopolized by Huawei and ZTE.
In Shenzhen, there are a large number of suppliers of switches, OLTs, ONUs, and transceivers. Most of the suppliers are former foundries of Huawei and ZTE.and then learn their technology, improve, and evolve.and create the factory of themself.