Comment on Ubiquiti: The U.S. Tech Enabling Russia's Drone War
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks agoIf they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians.
I’m curious on how?
Comment on Ubiquiti: The U.S. Tech Enabling Russia's Drone War
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks agoIf they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians.
I’m curious on how?
Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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 relationship 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]): - [1] Shipments into a region/channel. Units that were sent to a geography (not sales, just shipments) - [2] POS transactions (syndicated providers offer this albeit it’s less comprehensive on a global geography basis than [1]) - [3] You’re going to always have a delta between the two measures ([1], [2]) above, because you have things like B2B sales, government sales, shipments into the regional distributor channel and so on. These numbers are also available on a regional basis from market data providers.
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?
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 1 week ago
For one, you need to understand whether Nvidia is acting in good faith or not. If they are not, then one needs to create legal incentives for them to start acting in good faith.
A basic evaluation of sales dynamics is done irrespective of sanctions (remember how the example I described was tied to defining a functional bonus system). Nvidia has an understanding of their sales flow into Singapore. If you have a long standing partner that sees an increase in shipments that aligns with internal demand forecast (which are developed anyways), there is no red flag.
If you suddenly have an unknown entity placing orders larger than the total sales in Singapore for the last quarter. That is a clear red flag. You need to ask them who their end-customers are and whether they have validated that their own end-customers aren’t working on sanction workarounds. If they don’t cooperate, then you blacklist the entity and owners and don’t send them any more shipments.
If Nvidia (or a suspicious new distributor) isn’t doing, then they are acting in bad faith.
That’s why my example referred to a competitor of Ubiquiti (i.e. you don’t actually need activation data to run the calculations as described in my reply to you).
What outlined is just one tool in a toolkit that is regularly used outside of any sanction compliance.
Sales (especially for high-margin high tech items) isn’t done an intuition basis since as far back as the 60s/70s. With modern tech you can very much track your sales flow and identify suspicious sources that are almost certainly working on sanctions work around.
It’s all a matter of motivation (and lack of incentives).
I curious, do you have any information to suggest Ubiquiti has been acting in good faith?
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I think you are vastly overestimating things here.
I’ve purchased Ubiquiti hardware. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of shipped directly to the final destination. There was no middle man, no previous relationship, no vendor, no sales associate. I just went to their website, put in my credit card info, and gave a shipping address.
It sounds like you’re saying that such a purchase should be put under scrutiny, but that scrutiny would be… asking me if I am a legit entity? And what, I need to provide some sort of ambiguous proof that I am not the Russian military?
You’re jumping straight into “are they making efforts to prevent it” without even providing a real life way to do so. Sales metrics are all good and fine, but all that really tells you is that there are potentially more sales than needed. The funny thing is, these sales could be spread throughout hundreds of corporations in dozens of countries.
Countries have been doing clandestine purchasing for decades if not centuries, you really think a good faith effort by one company would uncover what dozens of other countries can’t? You really think the US isn’t itching to figure out where those devices are getting in through? Or the EU? Or Ukraine? They have many more resources than Ubiquiti to figure this out. You think they just don’t care?