Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) may award Rs 40 billion contract for supplying GSM equipment to ZTE.
ZTE is likely to get the contract for supplying GSM equipment to BSNL because other competitive bidders including Huawei, Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks have said no to matching the lowest price of $50 per line quoted by ZTE.
As per the news reports the other competitive bidders have walked away from BSNL deal has they find $50 per line bid technically unviable for operations.
Earlier as part of the contract BSNL had decided to award contract of 15 million lines in 60:40 ratios to two different suppliers. The company plans to expand its pan-India second-generation network. It was this aim that BSNL had floated a tender in July 2011 to buy equipment worth about Rs 40 billion. It wanted to add capacity to its existing 2G network and improve services in the north, east and south zones.
However, the tender had to be revised several times and it was then that BSNL decided to follow the process of reverse auction where the company offering the lowest price would get the equipment purchase contract in two zones. The second-lowest bidder would get the contract for the third zone but at the same price quoted by the lowest bidder.
