ZTE overtakes Alcatel-Lucent in wireless infrastructure
Having jumped into handset top five, ZTE claims fourth place in base stations
Published: 15 April, 2010
The wireless infrastructure majors have been feeling intense pressure from Chinese rivals in recent years, but the main threat to the established order has come from Huawei. Now compatriot and competitor ZTE has stormed into the top five too, overtaking Alcatel-Lucent to rank in fourth place in the sector for the fourth quarter of 2009. This announcement comes days after ZTE announced that, according to iSuppli calculations, it had entered the global handset top five too, ousting Motorola.
The infrastructure figures come from Infonetics, which says that ZTE gained 12.6% market share in Q409, ahead of ALU but behind Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens. In macro base stations, it had 9% share, also putting it in fourth place.
Its growth has been driven strongly by 2009's Chinese 3G roll-outs and it is questionable whether ZTE will be able to sustain this market share once the cellcos in its home country ease back on their capex from this year. However, it is also expanding in other regions and even gaining footholds with major operators in areas, like western Europe, where it used to find it hard to sell. Indeed, the firm says it will have its first deal with a tier one US carrier within one to two years, as well as new contracts in Latin America.
Jack Wu, VP of wireless global marketing at ZTE, said recently that the firm had been invited to take part in a tender by Sprint Nextel, and it also opened a new LTE laboratory in Texas last fall. He added that ZTE was participating in an RFI (request for information) from America Movil, the pan-Latin American carrier. He said that ZTE had been "moving very slow" when the first US LTE contracts came around, though it still has a chance of some Verizon business, as the operator has been carrying out field trials of its technology. However, much of ZTE's volume is still coming from GSM.
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