New Delhi: Ericsson, the world's largest mobile network equipment maker, has extended its market share in telecom infrastructure globally to about 38% in 2011 and plans to increase investments in India to support its global product supply chain, its CEO Hans Vestberg said in an interaction to Indian media last week on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.
Vestberg said Ericsson had been successful in making China a global hub and wanted to replicate the same with its Indian operations.
"In China, we have established ourselves for supplying to the global chain. We want to do the same thing from India too. We have a big organisation in India and plan to add a lot more manpower. We will be investing more in manufacturing in India, which will become an export hub depending on market opportunities. We have to see how this plan work," Vestberg said without divulging additional details.
Ericsson has a production facility in Jaipur, but Vestberg said this was largely catered to the domestic market. "We can scale this up to a global supplies hub. With the right incentives, we are willing to do that," he added.
At the mobile event in Barcelona, Vestberg also unveiled new products and services, including tie-ups with Western Union for mobile money transfers. He also said that Africa's largest mobile phone company MTN would be the first operator to deploy its converged wallet platform, to provide integrated pre-paid charging and mobile financial services to its customers.
Ericsson's strategy is driven by changing consumer preferences and behaviour, as there will be 5 billion mobile broadband customers globally by 2016, from 1 billion today, while date traffic will see a ten-fold jump during this period, riding on the five-fold increase in smartphone users, Vestberg said.
According to the Ericsson CEO, the availability of a slew of value added services in real time was changing the way consumers used their mobile phones. Vestberg said the company's research showed that people used 76% of their time on smartphones for activities other than voice. Vestberg predicted rapid expansion in 4G networks to cater to increasing data requirement of customers and pointed out that 325 million people globally were already on LTE networks, of which 250 million were supported by Ericsson equipment.
Industry watchers say Ericsson's plans to expand its manufacturing facility in India and make the country a global hub may be aimed at adhering to new rules for network vendors that will be announced in the upcoming telecom policy.
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