Ubiquiti, a $33 billion tech empire, is led by Robert Pera, owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. He pledged to tighten controls on his products years ago — so why are Russian military units sending Ubiquiti vendors thank-you notes?
Ubiquiti, a $33 billion tech empire, is led by Robert Pera, owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. He pledged to tighten controls on his products years ago — so why are Russian military units sending Ubiquiti vendors thank-you notes?
That’s not really true. If they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians. It’s not a priority for Ubiquiti.
It’s like with money laundering, it’s very difficult to control (I am talking in a general sense). Yet you’ll find that enabling money laundering for drug cartels is treated relatively seriously by major western financial institutions.
I’m curious on how?
Here is a high-level discussion:
https://piefed.social/comment/9903594
But going beyond that, forgot about Ukraine for a second.
Let’s say you are a competitor of Ubiquiti and you want to develop a bonus structure for your regional teams. You want to know the return on your marketing spend, how well the regional sales teams are developing relationships with retailers, B2B and other source of revenues.
To do that you need to know your real market share. You know your own numbers, but if share is a component of your bonus structure, you need to have accurate numbers for your competition (your sales going up by 15% is a massive failure if the rest of the regional market truly grew by 30%, it means your teams are failing).
To do that, you have several source of data. Roughly speaking you have two basic measures ([1], [2]):
That being said, you have situations where ([1] - [2]) clearly does not equal anything close to even the highest estimates of [3]. That’s when you know shipments into a region are actually being diverted into another country (other countries?).
If the difference between ([1] - [2]) and [3] for your competitor is huge, you want adjust this in your regional market share calculations and bonus payouts. Because otherwise your regional team might be busting ass like no tomorrow and their performance is being undercounted because your competitor is not actually selling a large part of [1] in the given region, the units are going elsewhere.
Believe it or not, this can be a very sensitive topic. People tend to get very pissed off if their bonuses are impacted (especially if they work hard to grow their regional business).
And that’s if you don’t have access to Ubiquiti datasets; our thought experiment positions us as a company that is trying understand shipment to POS/sales transactions for our competitor; Ubiquiti.
If you are Ubiquiti, I assume (this was true in tech product segments where I have worked) you also have the benefit of being able to track geographic activation of your products (I am assuming it’s possible to update Ubiquiti devices?) and potentially their serial numbers; so you can track which shipments are being diverted to which geography. With some more work and tracking, you can figure out what’s going.
There are some other approaches to triangulation that are used that I am not going to cover here (assuming you are a competitor of Ubiquiti).
Do you see why I said what I did?
I’m curious on what your solution to the Nvidia problem is? Just stop selling to the market whose sales increased? Then the next, and the next?
Knowing where the hardware is getting in from isn’t a solution. How do they know which orders are legit, and which are meant to go to the restricted area?
And it’s already been pointed out that the Ubiquiti hardware in question requires no activation at all. In fact I don’t believe any Ubiquiti hardware inherently needs internet, never mind activation.
Some features may, but that’s different than requiring activation for the device to work.
That’s… difficult in practice. Especially since the people involved in trying to circumvent sanctions and get this sort of shit to the Russians don’t just order things directly. In the interest of confusing and delaying legal repercussions for anyone involved, there tends to be lots of misdirection. To your point around money laundering: you’re kidding yourself if you think that sort of thing has been completely quashed.
I understand. Nor am I naive enough to think it’s even possible to completely address money laundering or sanction workarounds.
It’s almost certain they have a lackadaisical (if not out right malicious) approach to limiting shipments that end up in russia. I am genuinely curious, is there a reason to believe otherwise?
Show your work
That’s a fair question.
Look at say Nvidia and import controls of enterprise GPUs into China. A highly politically and PR sensitive topic. Something that is arguably a bigger deal (for Nvidia) than breaking sanctions/restrictions on russia.
And yet it turned out that Nvidia had knowledge that around the same time that export restrictions on China were implemented (with their “topline” China shipment numbers declining), there was a massive increase in shipments to Singapore (a trade focused polity with a long history a ethnic-Chinese presence in local business communities).
Did Nvidia act upon this or did just decided to assume that “goly gee, it just so happened that our Singapore shipments started massively increase at exactly the same time we had implement export restrictions into China”.
The people behind Nvidia might be cruel, corrupt and regressive, but they are not stupid.
And I have no reason to believe Ubiquiti is any better from a moral perspective.
EDIT: More details from a similar question to yours (but much more polite): https://piefed.social/comment/9904032