To hear the analysts say it, Huawei is going great guns. Canalys says the Chinese phone company is coming close to becoming the world's No. 2 smartphone maker, surpassing Apple. Strategy Analytics says Huawei's tablet division grew 42 percent this quarter. And IDC has Huawei at the head of three powerful Chinese phone makers, No. 3-5 worldwide: Huawei, Oppo, and Xiaomi.

But for US consumers, and people interested in the US market, none of this matters. All three companies have nearly zero market share here. If they keep growing as fast as they are, we could soon be heading back to the trends of the mid-2000s, when the US market looked nothing like the global cellular handset market.

During the early smartphone years, between 2003-2008, Nokia dominated much of the world, but didn't sell many phones in the US. That "oddity" faded with the global dominance of Samsung, Apple, and LG, which were successful here and abroad.

But the global smartphone world is splitting again, because Huawei is—in many ways—the new Nokia. Like Nokia, Huawei is a dominant infrastructure provider, and the company has established a strong role in many global carriers by offering handset deals bundled with its base stations.

A political quirk stopped that from happening here. Back in 2012, Congress called Huawei's products a "security threat" because of Huawei's nebulous ties to the Chinese army, and effectively banned Huawei's infrastructure division from selling here. That caused the handset arm to back out for a while, too.

Huawei's problem in the US is special. But the political suspicion it's fallen under doesn't seem to apply to other Chinese phone-makers, and so it doesn't explain Oppo or Xiaomi's total failures here. ZTE has also had political problems here, but continues to succeed in sales.

US carriers and phone buyers don't have an anti-China bias. Our No. 4-6 phone makers—ZTE, Alcatel, and Lenovo-owned Motorola—are all Chinese. They totalled up to 21 percent of our market at the end of 2016, according to Counterpoint Research. The problem Huawei, Oppo, and Xiaomi experience here isn't about their origins. It's about how they choose to do business.

The Nokia Problem

Those companies' failures are examples of what I call the Nokia Problem; an unwillingness to deal with our unique market dynamics. Nokia was a successful voice-phone maker in the US in the late 1990s, but plummeted in market share in the early 2000s (long before it collapsed in the rest of the world) because it didn't want to play along with unique US technologies and carrier sales strategies.

Technology issues are less important than they used to be. If Huawei wanted to produce CDMA phones for Sprint's network, it could do so in a heartbeat. The real problem is business practices.

Chinese companies that succeed here are those devolve a lot of decision-making to local US organizations they trust. That's the big difference between Huawei and ZTE, for instance. ZTE's US division is empowered and relatively independent, with steady local CEO Lixin Cheng calling a lot of shots. Huawei's US operation has seen a lot of staff turnover and has had relatively little autonomy.

Selling phones in the US is still mostly down to carrier and retailer relationships; 85-90 percent of phones here are still sold through carriers, and many remaining phones are sold through Amazon. To get into a US carrier's lineup, companies need to go through long, grueling, expensive certification processes. They often set up offices near each carrier's headquarters. It's complex, expensive, and stressful work. ZTE and Alcatel have spent years building these relationships. Huawei has not.

New vendors with products similar to existing vendors' will get extra scrutiny: if Xiaomi comes in with an affordable phablet, a carrier will say, "why should we look at this when ZTE, who we've worked with for years, has a very similar phablet that's easier for us to source?" Xiaomi doesn't want the hassle.

The global smartphone market has expanded a lot in the past 10 years. Billions of people outside the US are buying smartphones, so these companies don't need the US market to survive. But it's worth understanding these dynamics so you can take a lot of these reports with a grain of salt. Just because a company is successful "globally" doesn't mean it will be successful in the US. It may not even mean it wants to be.