Five Firms Win Multi-Billion Dollar Chinese 3G Tender

Huawei, Motorola and Ericsson are reported to have been the biggest winners in the latest WCDMA infrastructure tender from China Unicom, industry sources have told the South China Morning Post. The firm believed to have issued a tender to cover 55 cities in 30 provinces - the first stage in a rollout to cover 282 cities with a total CAPEX of around US$11 billion during 2009.

Huawei is understood to have won 30.6% of the tender - and will carry out the work in cooperation with Motorola, which outsourced manufacturing parts to Huawei. Ericsson and its partners (New Postcom and FiberHome) secured a 25.6 per cent share.

In a move which surprised industry watchers, ZTE managed to take 21.5% of the tender - despite being weaker in the WCDMA market than its rivals.

Nokia Siemens Networks took 11.1% of the tender, followed by Alcatel-Lucent which picked up 10.2 percent.

At this time, the financial value of this portion of the network rollout is not known.

The company is pushing to launch its 3G network by the middle of May this year - in an effort to catch up with China Mobile which has been building its own trial 3G network for over a year.

On the web: South China Morning Post

Posted to the site on 24th January 2009