I was surprised to read this week that Huawei is now the number 2 supplier of carrier network equipment for both fixed and mobile. For several years now, the world has been waking up to the growing importance of the Chinese equipment vendors, but quite frankly I'd assumed that they were still in fourth place globally behind Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and NSN. But that was last year! This year Ericsson is still first with 18.7% of the market, with
Huawei a close second at 14.2%. Alcatel-Lucent has slipped to third place with 12.7% and NSN is fourth with 11.6%. The other Chinese vendor ZTE is in a respectable fifth place with 6.7%.
Some of this growth spurt is obviously driven by sales to support the voracious growth of the Chinese mobile industry, but much more of this growth is driven by 3G and 4G sales to the major western carriers. In fact another interesting counter-point to this story is
Ericsson's announcement this week that they had secured $1.8bn of contracts with China Mobile and China Unicom. This appears to be a real coup on their behalf and shows that we are entering a world we we have to stop drawing distinctions between the Global Equipment Suppliers and the Chinese Equipment Suppliers - we now seem to be entering a period where we have one-single global carrier infrastructure equipment industry.
The barriers are well and truly broken and are likely to stay broken!
Posted
03-30-2010 5:09 AM
by
Martin Creaner