Huawei has yet to make its presence felt in the Tier 1 U.S. market in spite of its success elsewhere. The company claimed it lost out to Ericsson and Nokia in the Advanced Wireless Services auction of T-Mobile in 2006 because the two companies undercut it in price. Based in Shenzhen, Huawei has achieved a lot in a span of almost 20 years. Started as a distributor of imported PBX products, the company has a variety of investments in business and technology lines. Huawei operates in North America, India, China, and Europe, and employs 44,000 people, over 21,000 of which are devoted to research and development. The company was chosen by Vodafone in 2006 to supply Vodafone-branded UMTS handsets marketed in 21 countries over the next five years. In spite of such achievements, the Chinese company remains to be a private corporation. Industry analysts are puzzled about Huaweis lack of financial transparency even as it publishes particular data and hires KPMG as an outside auditor. In 2005, the company registered $8.2 billion in sales, which pales in comparison to the $24 billion and $21 billion posted by Alcatel and Ericsson, respectively, in revenues in the same year. Huaweis Chinese rival, ZTE, which is traded on the Hongkong exchange, reported $2.7 billion in sales in 2005. There are also some events in the past that puts Huawei in embarrassing situations, including its decision in 1999 to sell telecommunications equipment in Iraq in defiance of the sanctions imposed by the United States, which it denied, as well as its legal dispute with Cisco Systems in 2003 for allegedly stealing the latters source code and infringing on the router technology patents, which was subsequently dropped by the U.S. company.