Huang Da Bin, chief executive officer of ZTE Telecom, sees huge opportunity in the rapidly growing Indian telecom sector. In an interview with tele.net, he talks about the company’s plans, including setting up a manufacturing unit in the country, and the challenges facing the sector. Excerpts…
How do you perceive the telecom market in terms of business opportunities?
The Indian telecom market has been growing at a tremendous pace. The telecommunication market offers a vast potential with so many companies in India and abroad ready to invest enormously in this market. International companies are also looking at the Indian telecom industry as one of the key markets in the world and considering it as a crucial telecom arena. ZTE sees great opportunities in terms of business in India. In fact, we are looking forward to equipping India with all the latest technologies available in the world.
How would you rate your company in terms of technology?
ZTE is technologically very advanced as compared to other companies in the Indian telecom space. We possess unprecedented skills and knowledge, which give us a leading edge over the competition. It is because of our R&D centre that we have been able to deliver some of the best customised solutions to our customers. ZTE has also got a breakthrough in providing capacity and management services to all our customers. For terminals, our service centres cover almost all the areas in India. The sale of our infrastructure products ranges from CDMA and GSM to optical transmission, data networks, softswitch, Wi-Max and value-added solutions.
Where does ZTE stand vis-a-vis competition?
Financial year 2006-07 was exceptionally good for ZTE India. Having done well internationally, we have been focusing on India, where things have finally started to look up. We did well vis-? -vis all our Chinese counterparts in competition with us. We also have a dedicated Customer Support Engineering Centre, R&D Centre and Training Centre located in Bangalore, unlike most of the international companies operating in India.
How has the company performed over the last one year in terms of customers and market share?
In financial year 2006-07, we registered a turnover of Rs 25.9 billion, showing a stupendous growth of 123 per cent. In wireless infrastructure, we have bagged a large rural order from Tata Teleservices to build a countrywide CDMA2000 network over the next three years. We have bagged CDMA and GSM base transceiver station orders from Reliance Communications. We have also bagged a key order from Spice Communications to provide wireless infrastructure and transmission. ZTE has performed equally well on the handsets front, winning large orders from Reliance and Bharti. In the GSM space, we are supplying handsets under the Spice brand name and in CDMA through Reliance Classic. ZTE has seen robust financial growth with the revenues growing from Rs 1.05 billion to Rs 1.85 billion, a nearly 76.2 per cent jump, and registered a market share of 11.6 per cent in the fixed wireless phone segment.
What are the future plans for the company?
ZTE sees India as the most important market outside China. Looking at the Indian telecom industry as the biggest potential market in the world, we intend to set up a manufacturing unit in the country in the near future. ZTE has identified India as its key strategic market and has now made its Indian operations a standalone entity. The Indian telecom industry is currently the fastest growing market globally and ZTE realised this even when it started operations in India in 2001 as a total telecommunications equipment provider. We have an R&D centre at Manesar, near Delhi, where we plan to manufacture handsets and infrastructure equipment.
What are the company’s strengths?
Despite being relatively new in the Indian telecommunications market (just six years), we bagged some major contracts and have become an important supplier to almost all the big operators in the country.
What are ZTE’s thrust areas?
ZTE is very aggressive about the CDMA market and will concentrate on becoming a major player in the next few years. With a sound understanding of the telecom market and a global presence, ZTE would like to be the leading telecom equipment partner for carriers worldwide. We are also looking forward to completing the project with Aircel, which is basically a trial network of WCDMA 3G technology. ZTE is also a member of more than 50 international standards-setting organisations such as the ITU, 3GPP, 3GPP2 and CDG. ZTE has acted as the standards’ drafter and editor in many fields such as next-generation networks, optical transmission, information security and 3G terminals.
What, in your opinion, are the immediate issues that need to be tackled to give a further fillip to the telecom industry?
Our major concern is to change the mindset related to the quality of Chinese products and services. We are trying to fulfil the needs and requirements of customers so that we can live up to their expectations and thus be able to minimise quality issues. So far, we have not received any complaints related to quality and performance from our wide customer base in India. We pride ourselves in providing customised solutions and services to our clients.
