14 DAY TRIAL // The latest WCDMA infrastructure tender from China Unicom is reported to have as its biggest winners Huawei, Motorola and Ericsson, according to the South China Morning Post, which cites industry sources. China Unicom has been recently granted a license for the deployment of a 3G network based on the European WCDMA technology.
According to the news, the carrier has supposedly released a tender to cover 55 cities in 30 provinces, which would be the first step taken in its attempt to cover 282 cities with a total CAPEX of around US$11 billion during 2009.
Huawei Technologies is reported to have won 30.6 percent of the tender, and it seems that it plans to work on it in collaboration with Motorola, which has outsourced manufacturing parts to Huawei. The second largest share of the tender went to Ericsson and its partners (New Postcom and FiberHome), which won 25.6 percent of it.
21.5 percent went to ZTE, which came as a surprise to industry watchers, considering the fact that the company is weaker than some of its WCDMA market rivals. The rest of the tender was secured by Nokia Siemens Networks, 11.1 percent, and Alcatel-Lucent with 10.2 percent.
According to some rumors, ZTE placed an especially-low bid for the tender, although it accounts for only a small share of the global WCDMA equipment market. On the other hand, the company is expected to be able to deliver new technology to support 3G, 3.5G and even 4G mobile standards at rather low costs.
"We believe ZTE's high market share is the result of a low-price strategy and its high market share in Unicom's GSM network, which enable ZTE to create a high synergy between the 2G and 3G networks," said Credit Suisse analyst Wallace Cheung yesterday.
The financial value of this stage of the network rollout has not been unveiled at the moment. Nevertheless, China Unicom is reported to plan on accelerating the deployment of the 3G network and that it will try to launch it by May this year, as it tries to keep itself in line with China Mobile, which has won a license for its own trial 3G network and has been working on it for more than a year.