[May 16, 2013] Foreign Telecom Equipment Makers Eyeing China 4G Market Tweet SHANGHAI, May 16, 2013 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- Foreign telecom equipment makers have cast eye on the Chinese 4G market in succession. Xi Guohua, chairman of China Mobile Ltd. (SEHK: 0941 and NYSE: CHL), the nation's biggest mobile phone operator, said at the start of this year that it would build 200,000 TD-LTE base stations in 100 prefecture-level-above cities across the country in 2013 and purchase over one million 4G terminals in the meantime. And last month, it held a mobilization meeting for related auctions. Markus Peter Rudolf Borchert, CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks for the Greater China Region, said in an interview on May 14 that it expected to win more share in the auction. Feng Yingduo, executive vice president and managing director responsible for market & strategy at Ericsson for the China and Northeast Asia region, pointed out that upon completion of building of the 200,000 TD-LTE base stations, China Mobile would become the biggest LTE operator in the world and China would become the biggest LTE market globally. The US is the biggest LTE market across the world currently, followed by Japan and South Korea. Europe sees local WCDMA networks be quite developed, thus is not in urgent need of building LTE ones. While, China is attaching more importance to LTE networks and any foreign telecom equipment makers will change its position in the global LTE sector, or even the wireless market, provided that it seizes a pretty share in the market. Chen Haofei, an analyst with CITIC Securities Co., Ltd. (SHSE: 600030), said that 2013 would be the first year for China Mobile to invest in TD-LTE in a large scale and building 200,000 base stations in one year would be a milestone. Thus the order would be quite significant for telecom equipment makers at both home and abroad. Mao Yu, minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), disclosed at a forum earlier this year that the nation would release the first batch of 4G licenses this year. And this indicated that larger-scale 4G network constructions would be launched in the near future. A top executive with ZTE Corp. (SEHK: 0763 and SZSE: 000063), a leading telecom equipment and network solution provider in the market, said months ago that the sharp edge homegrown Chinese telecom equipment makers owned in TD-SCDMA share was expected to maintain. Statistics show that the share Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., a domestic archrival of ZTE, and ZTE jointly seized in the phase-III auction China Mobile held for TD-SCDMA reached 56 percent, compared to seven percent of Nokia Siemens Networks and five percent of Ericsson. (USD 1 = CNY 6.15) Source: www.yicai.com (May 16, 2013) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]