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.

So Huawei is both flourishing and perishing, depending on the geography you look at. The Chinese company is both the darling of major pan-European carrier networks like Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, and Vodafone, and the untouchable pariah for US operators wary of its potential links to international espionage. There’s an obvious dissonance between these two positions, and I find it notable that Germany and the UK both rely heavily on Huawei for networking equipment. The first is a country famous for being extremely scrupulous about consumer privacy and data security, and the second is America’s closest political ally. At this point, it feels like US spy agencies have to either put up concrete allegations and evidence of wrongdoing on Huawei’s part, if there is any, or allow the company to carry on its business. The burden of proof is on the accusers.

It’s an undeniable loss for Huawei to miss out on one of the biggest premium phone markets in the world just as it’s ramping up its premium phone offering. But even without the US customers it’d dearly love to have, I expect this company will continue along its current upward trajectory. The P20 Pro marks a massive upgrade over last year’s mediocre P10, scoring major innovation kudos with its new triple-camera system, a thin design that nevertheless carries a huge 4,000mAh battery, and an utterly gorgeous two-tone colorway that shows Huawei developing its own style and panache.

To my eyes, Huawei is going through the evolution that Samsung underwent over the course of many years — going from a craven iPhone copycat to a confident design leader — condensed into the span of 12 months. Huawei is already one of the top three phone vendors in the world without a presence in the US market, and the scale of demand in its native China is substantial enough to offset that absence. Specifically on the premium front, Huawei’s opulent $2,600 Porsche Design Mate RS (a souped-up variant of the P20 Pro) has a special red color intended solely for mainland China.

So the Huawei P20 Pro has a triple camera setup. 40MP main sensor that's TWICE THE SIZE of the S9's. A 20MP monochrome and an 8MP tele.



Got a 109 on dXomark (whatever) but check out those sample photos. Clean AF.



WHY WOULD YOU NOT BRING THIS TO THE UShttps://t.co/rjJH2iBqJo pic.twitter.com/FICMqoWIWu — Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) March 27, 2018

In all of this, the US consumer is losing out the most. The US phone market is, for all practical purposes, a duopoly. Most people get either the Samsung or the Apple flavor of smartphone pie because Galaxy S and iPhone devices are the most abundant and most forcefully advertised ones in carrier stores. Countless companies have tried and failed to make a business out of selling phones without carrier support and endorsement in the US: Nextbit failed, HTC and Sony failed, Razer is currently failing, and Essential failed spectacularly. Huawei can be counted among that group, too, especially now that even Best Buy doesn’t want to touch its products.

The problem with the Samsung-Apple dominance in the US is perfectly illustrated by the case of this year’s Galaxy S9, which can be uncharitably summed up as a Galaxy S8 with the fingerprint sensor in the right place and some horrifying AR Emoji thrown in. What does the US phone buyer do when Samsung or Apple shows complacency, incompetence, conservatism, or some combination thereof? What’s the fallback plan if you don’t want to make the increasingly difficult switch to another operating system? If you’re on Android, you could try your luck with LG, perhaps, but that’s the totality of it. Google’s excellent Pixel phones still lack the widespread distribution to have any effect on this situation.

We expect biggest marketing campaign ever from Huawei in Western Europe as funds planned for AT&T launch are likely redirected. Huawei will be desperate to grab share and offset loss in sales volume in US. Bad news for rivals #SeeMooore #OOO pic.twitter.com/vVaZn5JqJk — Ben Wood (@benwood) March 27, 2018

Without Huawei, the US phone market is poorer than it would otherwise be. Hell, if the P20 Pro turns out to be even two-thirds as good as its launch event promised, Americans will have legitimate reason to gripe about not having easy access to one of the best smartphones in the world. With a strong presence in China and increasing brand awareness in Europe, Huawei is well-positioned to keep growing, even without the considerable boost that a US carrier deal might have brought. Industry analysts now expect to see Huawei redirect its unspent US marketing budget toward raising the company’s profile in Western Europe.

Ultimately, it all boils down to this: Huawei never did much business in the US, and so losing out on the market opportunity is costly but not a total disaster; the US, on the other hand, has landed in an uncomfortable duopoly situation that strangles consumer choice. The US phone market needs a respectable third player more than Huawei needs the US market.