ZTE Commits To India

Recent media reports from MWC Asia 19 in Shanghai underline the continuing interest from China’s big names in the Indian telecommunications market.

In particular vendor ZTE regards India’s mobile telecoms sector as a key target, seeing it as a market with what ZTE’s president for Global Sales, Xiao Ming, has described as “huge potential”.

ZTE already has a presence in India – it is the main vendor for VNSL and Airtel and also has a relationship with Reliance Jio – but the country remains one of the firm’s key destinations for expansion. The firm says it increased its market share following the merger between Vodafone and Idea Cellular and is hiring staff in India to support growth.

5G, which is still in its infancy in India, clearly has potential as a vendor opportunity but may be a challenge for operators in a market where a race to compete on price and affordability has benefited consumers but made it difficult for many operators to profit from 4G. Questions of 5G spectrum allocation and pricing, which may hold back investment, will also need to be resolved.

Nevertheless ZTE seems to be optimistic that new technology can play a part in monetising 5G, helping operators to lower the cost of their network deployment and increase the efficiency and capability of their networks in what is a very low ARPU market.

It will certainly be interesting to see how vendors like ZTE can help Indian operators approach the demands of not only rolling out a high-quality 5G service but also of making it pay.―Developing Telecoms