In the ever-competitive mobile telecom marketplace, winning contracts in a global market that is suffering from the current financial drop-out is no mean feat. In winning just more than 40 percent of new commercial contracts highlights the Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies is clearly doing something very right.
According to In-Stat, Huawei has secured 42 new UMTS/HSPA contracts, representing 40.4 per cent of the total number of new contracts signed globally in 2008. This latest ranking means that the company has been recognized by various industry groups as the leader in UMTS/HSPA for the third consecutive year. To determine just how Huawei has managed to receive this accolade, we spoke to Huawei director of wireless marketing, Xingang Lu at GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009, who told us that through the company’s themed showcase, "Mobile Innovators," this underscored its commitment and leadership to enhancing the mobile experience, innovation and customization and the products and services that followed on.
“Around 80 percent of operators have GSM/UMTS and the balance have CDMA who are evolving to LTE. The latter category comprises some North African networks but mainly China Telecom. Out of the 6 million GSM TRX’s, we have provided 1.5 million of them giving us 24 percent of the market. One of our largest LTE contracts is with Bell Canada and this network is UMTS/LTE-ready to follow the operator’s wish for a seamless transition,” said Xingang.
With over nine years' work experience in mobile network solution development and marketing, Xingang has accumulated rich experience for the global mobile infrastructure market in terms of GSM. UMTS, CDMA and WiMAX. When asked about when we might see the first LTE network, Xingang said it was for the operators to decide when they were ready as Huawei only supply the solution, but he felt confident the first LTE network would appear in Japan.
“The current global financial situation is not slowing down the progress of LTE in uour view, as Huawei and Ericcson have recently been awarded the contract to build LTE networks in Oslo and Stockholm for TeliaSonera, respectively,” said Xingang (see TeliaSonera signs 4G commercial contracts). In fact, last year the company launched a ‘convergent’ base station with all the GSM, UMTS, CDMA, WiMAX, LTE technologies within one cabinet and many elements can be shared between the network issues. Solutions, soloutions, solutions, were Xingang’s last three words!