Huawei Technologies revealed that its contract sales of wireless access equipment, core network and auxiliary infrastructure reached US$10 billion in 2008, a growth of 50% from 2007.
Head of Huawei’s Wireless Network Branding, Lu Xingang has told CommsDay recently that the vendor now counts 35 of the world’s top 50 operators as customers, and is registering growth across the board with all wireless technologies.
Its success is led by GSM, which registered a 100% growth year on year for 2008. Huawei shipped 1.5 million transceivers inside its GSM base stations during the year, representing around 30% of the total GSM market and number 2 in the world, Lu said. Huawei also registered impressive growth in UMTS and CDMA sales last year. “UMTS also grows very fast. Huawei won 42 new UMTS/HSPA commercial contracts in 2008.
By the end of 2008 we have accumulated a total of 128 UMTS/HSPA commercial contracts, which means Huawei has constructed half of global UMTS/HSPA networks,” Lu said.” Although the CDMA market size is becoming smaller, Huawei CDMA still maintains a 35% growth with 220,000 transceivers new shipments in 2008. Huawei performed particularly well in China, winning 30%+ market share in China Telecom CDMA phase-1 project.”
Lastly, Huawei is also supplying China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network, and had a 17.5% market share in China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network last year, according to Lu.
BEYOND ASIA:
Geographically, Huawei is expanding rapidly beyond its base in Asia, and into overseas markets. “Asia Pacific is the largest region for Huawei’ wireless product line,” Lu said, adding: “We are also growing very fast in Europe and the North America regions. From corporate sales perspective, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe are the fastest growing regions.” Lu expects growth to be sustained in 2009 as operators look to roll out new platforms and optimize their existing networks. “Many mobile operators are facing challenges in network transformation.
Firstly, operators have to introduce more advanced technology, such as Femtocell, HSPA+ and even LTE, to increase service revenue,” Lu said. “On the other hand, operators are also thinking of ways to improve legacy network performance and efficiency, and to converge multi mobile networks.”
LTE CONTRACT AND TRIALS:
Looking ahead, Huawei is already implementing LTE. Recently, it won the world’s first commercial LTE contract with TeliaSonera along with Ericsson. Lu revealed that the company has already deployed LTE trials in Europe, North America and Japan and has completed field tests, including throughput, latency, MIMO, high speed multi-user access and cell hand off, as well as multi-service QoS. At the same time, it is developing both FDD and TDD versions of LTE.
“The first commercial LTE product will support FDD at 2.6GHz & 700MHz and TDD at 2.6GHz,” Lu said, adding the both FDD and TDD platforms will be launched commercially within 2009. “Huawei is closely working with all of three China operators in the roll-out plan. It is estimated that the first China LTE trial will commence in late 2009. Year 2009/2010 is the most important period for China operators to do LTE trials.”
