ZTE wins $254 mn contract from Telenor

CALIFORNIA: ZTE, China's second-largest telecoms equipment supplier, has sealed a deal to build a mobile network for Norway's Telenor, a newspaper report said on Sunday.

Under a 200 million euro ($254 million) contract to be announced on Monday, ZTE will build a mobile network for 4.5 million users for Telenor in Hungary, the Financial Times said on its website.

ZTE and crosstown rival Huawei Technologies have been two of China's biggest export success stories in the high-tech sector, rising from relative obscurity over the last decade to become two of the world's top sellers of wireless mobile network equipment.

The newspaper said ZTE expects several other large contracts from European operators to come through in the next couple of months.

"Virtually all European operators have shortlisted us now," ZTE Chief Executive Shi Lirong told the FT in an interview.

Shi was quoted as saying that ZTE, which started supplying customised handsets to European carriers years ago, is in the early stages of applying the same strategy in the United States.

ZTE's sales in Asia outside of its key China market fell 19 percent to 5.2 billion yuan ($770 million) in the first six months of the year, hit by the Indian ban that began earlier in the year over security concerns.