https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17174840/huawei-p20-pro-apple-samsung-us-absence

This week in Paris, I witnessed a subtle but profound moment of change in the mobile industry. It came when Huawei announced its next flagship phone, the P20 Pro, will cost €899 (more than $1,100), and no one in the audience blinked, winced, or otherwise expressed dissatisfaction. The company whose name was previously one half of a rhyming couplet with the words “who are they?” just came out with a super expensive device to rival the iPhone X and Galaxy S9, and everyone was perfectly fine with that. Not many phone makers are able to rise up into the premium market after starting out in the budget segment, but Huawei is doing it at speed and to great effect.

At roughly the same time as Huawei’s triumphant launch on European soil, US electronics retailer Best Buy was cutting ties with the company and discontinuing sales of its products. Earlier in the year, AT&T had reneged on an agreement to sell the Mate 10 Pro smartphone in its carrier stores, reportedly due to pressure from suspicious US authorities. Verizon is believed to have bowed to the same behind-the-scenes diktat a couple of weeks later, and American intelligence agencies have issued unanimous advice to the country’s citizens to avoid using Huawei phones. For more than five years, the US has been issuing unsubstantiated warnings about Huawei’s relationship with the Chinese government, and 2018 has brought that antagonism to the fore.