Indian telecom equipment grow 20%

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The Indian telecom equipment industry reported a 20 percent growth in revenues to cross the $24 billion mark during FY 2008-09 compared to a 24 percent growth recorded in the previous financial year (2007-08). This was revealed by technology publisher CyberMedia’s flagship telecom industry journal Voice&Data’s annual survey to be published in the June 2009 issue.

Despite overall economic slowdown, India has been witnessing over 10 million month-on-month new mobile subscriber additions, and telecom operators have been buying equipment to expand their networks.

Of the three components of the telecom equipment industry, carrier equipment business grew the fastest at 27 percent to report revenues of Rs 72,616 crore, followed by the next fastest growing, enterprise equipment category with revenues of Rs 15,242 crore, a growth of 15.4 percent.

Telecom again bucked the trend in the slowdown-hit enterprise technology market, as large business organizations bought equipment for video conferencing, wireless LANs, network security, network storage and voice solutions. Cost-saving and productivity-enhancement technologies were a strong growth area.

“We've seen this before: in a downturn, telecom gains, as businesses deploy cost-saving tech,” said Prasanto K Roy, Chief Edito, Voice&Data. “In the last downturn, IP telephony got a boost. This time, it's video-conferencing, including high-spend areas such as telepresence,” he added.

Interestingly, the phones category, which primarily includes CDMA, GSM and fixed phone handsets, placed at number two in terms of revenues at Rs 26,669 crore, grew a modest 6 percent, owing to crashing handset prices, major growth happening in semi-urban and rural areas where more entry level phones sell, and large scale proliferation of low cost Chinese phones.

According to the survey estimates, Finnish mobile and equipment maker Nokia posted revenues of Rs 16,567 crore to retain its 'numero uno' rank among telecom equipment players. Nokia was followed by Ericsson at no 2 (Rs 10,310 crore), Nokia Siemens Networks at no 3 (Rs 9,848 crore) and Alcatel-Lucent at no 4 (Rs 8,050 crore), all telecom infrastructure solution providers.

Chinese vendor Huawei landed at No 5 by more than doubling its revenue to Rs 6,240 crore. Another Chinese player ZTE improved grew its revenues by 60 percent to claim no 7 position with revenues of Rs 4,800 crore.