Cisco, Huawei, Ericsson on the hook for Philippine telco's $880M overspend

Cisco, Huawei, and Ericsson have all been asked to take a hit after a Filipino telco blew its budget by a whopping $880 million and blamed it on bad procurement processes. This story starts in late 2022 when Filipino telco PLDT issued a press release describing the success of a multi-year program to transform its core networks …

[Pascal Monett]

"Few businesses can endure [..] $880 million of unplanned expenditure"

If the Prime Minister loks at that the first thing he thinks is "Pff, amateurs".

[nijam]

> ...blamed it on bad procurement processes.

The larger the organisation, the worse the procurement process, as a generalisation.

[NeilPost]

Procurement as a ‘Profit Centre’ is always bad.

[RichardBarrell]

Small potatoes

They'll be amortising this stuff over decades. It sounds like a big number but a 20% cost overrun is nothing in an infrastructure project.

I am very doubtful of the implicit assumption that the project wouldn't have had this overrun if the procurement process had been followed to the letter.