ZTE has an even tougher job than Huawei to convince operators to stick with it. It lies a fairly distant fourth in the mobile infrastructure market, and so is more dispensable than Huawei in many markets, especially as its strength outside China lies in emerging economies, many of which will not implement sanctions, but will not deploy 5G at scale for many years either. Ming Xiao, head of sales at ZTE, was putting a brave face on the situation at a recent conference in Italy, where he said that, now a settlement had been reached with the US over access to American components, ZTE was targeting a 25% share of the telco equipment market – up from 10% now, though…