Russians hate the West and the incumbents know it. If Western companies started to muscle in again they would drop the price to protect their market shares.

Kind of silly to give up your entire market share over an unwinnable war.

reply to below: I had to add the rebuttal to your racist comment earlier (which you ironically deleted) by editing this comment, because I am being throttled and cannot reply to anymore comments.

Hiring people to put batteries in phones and phones in boxes? Never done that specifically, but other assembly line stuff like that does not require much. Certainly not a multi year culture building process. I used to work for a company that built food gift boxes. When we staffed up for the holiday season, it took about 20 minutes to train new hires. We once added an entire line in a day to make a custom product. I’m not saying that the managers and workers didn’t work hard, but it was not particularly complex work. Most of the difficulty was in finding ways to reduce packing times by a few percentage points.

Put this way: your company have a week to build one of the above processes for 1500 phones a week, and they get a $1mm bonus if they succeed. Do you choose pick and place assembly or battery assembly.

I've seen "Packaged in $country" on boxes before, so I suspect they are two different things.

Like food made in Canada that shows up in American chain stores being labeled "Distributed by QFC." There's lots of rules about this sort of thing.

Reminds me of back in the late 90's when Wal-Mart was all rah-rah about "Made in the USA!" on all of its products. Then my company bought every employee a Sam's Club membership and the cards were all marked "Litho en Mexico."