Motorola, Lucent Pace China Wireless Contracts

Motorola Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. nailed down the lion's share of $2.3 billion worth of telecommunications contracts awarded by China's two largest wireless companies.

Motorola was awarded about $1.1 billion, split between China United Telecommunications Corp. (China Unicom), awarding a $556 million contract, and China Mobile Communication Corp., awarding $510 million. Lucent was awarded a series of contracts totaling $350 million from both Chinese wireless firms.

Motorola's China Unicom contract is for expansion of Unicom's CDMA 2000 1X networks and for upgrading the firm's GSM networks in Beijing and 12 provinces. The Chinese firm noted that it has awarded $627 million worth of contracts to Motorola in the past year. Said Rueybin Kao, a Motorola corporate vice president, in a statement: "We rolled out CDMA networks for Unicom when it launched the service in 2001 and have been closely involved in the various upgrades right up to this latest technology."

The CDMA expansion will be capable of transmitting multimedia applications at high speeds. Unicom has some 19 million CDMA users and 71 million GSM users.

Motorola will upgrade China Mobile's GSM/GPRS network, enabling the network to boost its mobile and data services. The expansion is scheduled to be completed by the end of next year and will increase the network's capacity to cover an additional 10.5 million subscribers.As for Lucent, its contracts are spread over both Chinese firms and cover a range of technologies from CDMA to VoIP. In a statement, Lucent said: "The agreements cover virtually the entire range of Lucent's next-generation network offerings and services that are designed to accelerate the smooth evolution to packet networks as well as enabling the delivery of advanced multimedia communications services."

Other contracts award by China Unicom and China Mobile Tuesday went to Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, LM Ericsson, Intel, and UTStarcom. The contracts were signed in Washington, prompting some observers to note that the awards should help cool protectionist sentiment in Congress.