They give away low cost hardware because it's a military branch of the government whose purpose is establishing a global surveillance network. Being profitable is a nice to have but not a primary purpose as they get subsidized by the state regardless.
Okay. So Chinese government keeps pumping money into Huawei, Xiaomi, Tencent, Alibaba, Tiktok and many other businesses so that they can ..... make money? You have to ask an economist for how this works, I am not intelligent enough to figure it out.
