Article content

Jonathan Calof was on a tour of Huawei Technologies’ Shenzhen, China campus not long ago when he unexpectedly came across some familiar faces.

On a wall of fame for stars of the Chinese company were several former employees of Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications giant that suffered a spectacular collapse a decade ago.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Exclusive: Did Huawei bring down Nortel? Corporate espionage, theft, and the parallel rise and fall of two telecom giants Back to video

“These are (now) Huawei employees associated with great technological accomplishments … and I recognized so many of them,”said Calof, a University of Ottawa business professor who was visiting the site with MBA students. “At one level you’re proud to be a Canadian, at the same time you’re upset to be a Canadian.”

The ex-Nortel engineers’ place of honour in Shenzhen underscores how the two companies’ fortunes unfurled for years in striking parallel, and yet with starkly different outcomes.

They produced similar equipment, competed for the same contracts and tried to negotiate joint ventures. As one grew into a Goliath, the other crumbled to pieces. In Nortel’s waning days, Huawei reportedly backed a bid to keep it alive, only to ultimately walk away. And then snap up many of the bankrupt firm’s most-skilled staff.