Nearly 40 years ago a company was founded to sell electronic games machines.
The founder of the company discovered that the distributors of pinball machines - who were the natural distributors for electronics games machines - wanted exclusive deals.
So the company founder got his next door neighbour to set up an apparently competitor company selling similar products.
Of course the products were virtually identical as they came from the same source, but the arrangement gave distributors the illusion they were getting an exclusive deal.
Later on, the next door neighbour became the President of the original company which was sold, when two years old, for around $30 million.
Sounds similar to what happens with EMS now. Still waiting to hear of a HP netbook board appearing inside a Dell netbook but most of these 'special' phones some networks supply are just a change of plastic.