ZTE to treble its share of Iranian market

“ZTE, along with other companies such as Huawei, Nokia and Sony Ericsson have participated in the tender for installing Third Operator equipment,” Gue Liming, ZTE chief representative in Iran, said at a press conference, indicating that the company had a long experience in China and Hong Kong.
He said ZTE was among world’s top three in WiMAX technology and old equipment worldwide were now being replaced by ZTE equipment.
He also claimed that ZTE ranked sixth in the world in mobile phone production and they had decided to present their mobile to the Iranian market so that they would be acquainted to the Iranian public, although the timing of such introduction had not yet been set and they needed to do some market research first.
“We started mobile production of different price-range about two years ago and we have signed contract with some major world mobile operators one of which is production of 20 million mobile sets” he said.
“Our procurement of some of Telecommunication Company of Iran equipment have been through transparent tender procedures, although we did object to some of purchases that took place from our business competitors,” he added.
He welcomed TCI privatization and indicated with Third Operator coming to the fore there would be new market and they would like to seize the opportunity.
“Third Operator recently held a tender and as its first phase our equipment are to be installed at 9 cities,” he added.
Hassan Babaian, ZTE deputy managing director, as next speaker announced the formation of a joint workshop by TCI and ZTE at which solutions to three TCI strategies have been offered:
Firstly, to replace IMS networks with a mobile network, since NGN was not a one-and-all solution.
Secondly, TCI authorities should look into problems more thoroughly and do as major world operators had done before.
Thirdly, TCI and its subsidiaries should arrange more of such gatherings with ZTE
personnel in future.
He indicated that ZTE currently had two running projects with Mobin Net and Spadan.
“One thing that ZTE is quite concerned about is environmental issues and for them the company has come up with some solutions,” he said.
He said ZTE’s NGN networks involved 3.1 billion subscribers and only 25% of them were in China and the rest were scattered around the world.
“We have been in the Iranian market for the past 10 years. We have recently set up a production line at ITMC in Shiraz which manufactures landline phone equipment, and another in Tehran for equipment repair. We have a large group of engineers in Iran and intend to take on Iranian engineers as much as possible,” he added.
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