BANGALORE: ZTE Corporation, provider in telecommunications services, announced that it had entered into a partnership with China Development Bank and also signed a “Development of Financial Cooperation Agreement”, a five-year cooperation framework agreement, with the latter.

This partnership would focus on further strengthening the relationship between the two. According to the agreement, both the parties would work together to establish an investment and financing platform, including expansion to overseas markets such as India, which would offer extensive growth potential for ZTE.

According to the agreement, China Development Bank would provide ZTE a $15 billion credit line, including ZTE’s overseas project financing and ZTE’s credit limits. The two companies had been in discussion to develop specific terms and procedures on financing project and how to effectively execute the business cooperation.

This initiative holds special significance for telecom operators in a fast growing market like India where a large number of new players were set to launch services and the existing players had drawn up large-scale expansion plans to offer 3G services and penetrate rural markets. In order to address this opportunity, ZTE would set aside a significant portion of the credit line for Indian telecom operators.

In India, ZTE had recently won a contract from Sistema Shyam Teleservices Limtied (MTS) to provide telecom infrastructure and handsets for the national rollout of CDMA mobile services by the operator. ZTE’s existing clients in India included Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL, Reliance Communications, Tata, Spice Telecom, Aircel and Sistema Shyam Teleservices Linited.