Problem was that a lot of Nortel equipment was bought by blind companies in SE Asia, reverse engineered, remanufactured and sold under a different brand name at a greatly reduced price. I remember back then that some of our equipment was being sold for up to $5k per circuit board and a "frame" (up to dozens of circuit boards, stored in cabinets that were hard wired together) were selling for up to a half million each. We were also making complete telelcommunications switch systems stored in modified tractor trailer units that were sold for $50 million each. All you had to do was drive the unit up to your central switch station and hard wire it into your system. In some situations these mobile switches were capable of handling up to tens of thousands of individual lines.
Also as mentioned, a lot of our production went out of country, due to NAFTA, particularly to Raleigh Park, North Carolina and to Mexico. The Mexican production quality SUCKED. We had roughly a 98% inhouse acceptance rating of product made in Canada compared to a roughly 33% of product made in Mexico. We tried to ship the rejected product back to Mexico for reworking but in the log run it doubled our cost of that product. The Asian factor and NAFTA is what really started the slow death of Nortel.
