Huawei Enterprise Group wants to strengthen its presence in India. The company in a release said that it is embarking on a series of road shows to showcase its ICT products and solutions. The company wants to showcase enterprise solutions like telepresence, video surveillance, ECC, unified communications and IPCC in India.
Speaking on growth potential, Mr. Eric Yu, President, Huawei Enterprise said, "We are looking at garnering 10 per cent market share in India by 2015. In order to achieve this growth, we will be enabling the enterprise community with specific solutions on cloud computing, unified communications, smart city implementation and data centre solutions.”
The company, which clocked $1.5 billion in revenues from India in 2011-12, is also betting big on the roll out of 4G LTE services in India and is targeting more than 50 per cent share of the contracts coming in.
“2011 was a good year for Huawei because our revenues in India increased about 20 per cent. Last year, we began building a new R&D centre in Bangalore, which will house more than 5,000 people. This includes the R&D centre, manufacturing and marketing among others,” Huawei India Chief Executive Officer, Mr Cai Liqun, said.
The company began its work on setting up a R&D centre in Bangalore last year and investing $150 million in the facility, which is expected to become operational from June 2013.
Besides, it also has a Global Service Resource Centre in Bangalore, along with a Global Network Operations Centre, which is its largest such centre outside of China. These centres cater to its clients across 140 countries.
“We have GTECs in China, but this will be first outside China. It is under discussion. Indians have language advantage as well as technology and that is what we want to capitalise on through this centre,” Mr Liqun added.
Of the company’s $1.5 billion Indian revenues, $1.2 billion was contributed by its network business driven by 3G deployment and network expansion by operators, while the remaining $300 million came from devices like handsets, dongles and set top boxes.
“I think 2012 is a tough year for the whole telecom industry in India because the policy is not clear. Operators are waiting for licences. This period will see no major investment but after all this is solved, we are confident of the Indian market,” Mr Liqun said.
The company has already deployed 4G LTE network for telecom major, Bharti Airtel, in Bangalore.
Huawei, which has a low single-digit market share in the mobile phones segment in the country, is also looking at ramping up its presence in the category.
Globally, it is targeting the sales of 60 million mobile phones this year and is hopeful that its ‘Ascend P1’ (launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona) will make waves in India.