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What is Siemens' thrust in India this year?
Siemens, investment in India this year and also the upcoming year is going to be big. And also the rollout in terms of radio base stations and all the investment that is behind the transmission-India has already passed in terms of number of subscribers growth compared to the Chinese market. I think that India will offer the biggest single market in terms of capex investment in the next two years.
What will Siemens be focusing on?
Infrastructure and managed services, especially in mobile networks. In fixed line business we already have a business, which we want to maintain. But money spent on mobile area is much more than fixed line. In terms of radio infrastructure, we are doing GSM, 3G, and WiMax
What are your expansion plans in India?
We are looking to club the R&D activity regionally. Once we introduce that concept there, we can then have shared service centers in the Asian region. We will have 2-3 service centers for this region, and India will be one of them.
We are going into manufacturing mobile infrastructure and base stations and invest approximately $100 mn over the next year in the mobile in the mobile network infrastructure.
We have been making IP DSLAM fixed line equipment in Kolkata for more than a decade. We also have a second option in Chennai, where we hope to start production within this year.
What range of equipment do you plan to manufacture from here?
Principally, radio infrastructure. Not UMTS yet, because we need certain volumes for that. We would start with GSM and EDGE. Whether WiMax or not, is really a question of volumes and scale around the globe.
How comfortable is Seimens working simultaneously with HSDPA and WiMax, especially as Super 3G and WiMax are seen as competing technologies?
More than 80% of all requests for WiMax that we are getting are from fixed line customers. Customers are not looking at WiMax as a mobile or a cellular network.
Without questioning the potential that WiMax has, we see it more on the broadband wireless space rather than in the mobile space.
What are Seimen's innovative technologies for rural rollout in India?
India is not unique in this kind of thing. If you look to other regions such as Brazil, you have the same ARPU. You have the rural areas in the northeast of Brazil, where you have ARPU of $2-3 per month. Other regions such as Sao Paolo may have $30-50. What you need to do, is to differentiate. You cannot deliver the same technology to Delhi, which you would deliver in the rural areas. We are also spreading our portfolio in terms of low cost solution etc. One of the ways that we are also going to pursue is local manufacturing and localizing the material, purchasing in India instead of importing it.
We don't have to look only on capex, because the capex is the smallest piece of all. We have to look at the opex model. That means we are working on power consumption. Today we have one of the cheapest solutions in terms of power consumption. And we are also launching a pure IP transmission model. That means that the base station is going over the DSL or even microwave.
Are these solutions part of any rollout yet?
It is not a complete rollout yet. Later this year or beginning next year, we will have an all IP network. Currently, we are not rolling out IP in India.
Alok Singh
Source: Voice&Data
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