Huawei bags $180-$220 mn managed services, network operation deal from Vodafone India

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Chinese telecom gear maker Huawei Technologies has bagged a managed services and network operations contract worth around $180-$220 million from Vodafone India for a total of five circles, replacing Finnish gear vendor Nokia.

Under the three-year contract, Huawei will provide managed services to Vodafone in Kerala, Tamil Nadu & Chennai and Orissa circles, and it will also provide network operations to the telco in Andhra Pradesh and Delhi circles, a person familiar with the matter told ET. The person added that some portion of managed services is still with Nokia in Andhra and Delhi circles.

The new contract follows a recent big-ticket deal that Huawei got from India’s leading telco Bharti Airtel for the upgradation of wireline network with vectoring, GPON and G.Fast technologies, which helped the carrier in launching100 Mbps broadband services in 87 cities.

Huawei has lately been making inroads into the country’s telecom managed services segment, which has been led by Sweden’s Ericsson and Nokia so far. The Shenzhen-based company had last year had won managed services and network modernization deal for six circles worth Rs 1200 crore from Norway-based Telenor’s India unit, and is already managing four telecom circles for smaller GSM telco Aircel.

“The agreement has been signed between both Vodafone and Huawei. Both the companies are now working towards formalization of the contract, which includes transition of manpower,” a second person said.

The person added that third-party employees working with the existing vendor will now move to Huawei, along with some of Vodafone and Huawei’s on-roll employees. “Overall, there will be around 1000 employees, third party and on rolls employees included.”

Vodafone had 200.1 million subscribers in the country with 25.63% market share in August, as per data shared by Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

A Vodafone spokesperson said that the company works with several infrastructure providers across the country, but declined to comment on the specific Huawei partnership. For example, in February this year, Vodafone had awarded a three-year contract to Ericsson to manage its optical fibre cable networks in 10 circles in East and West India, spanning a distance of roughly 45,000 kms.

Huawei, which didn’t respond to ET’s emailed queries, though has been working with Vodafone on other contracts. India’s No. 2 telco had earlier awarded a $150-million pan-India deal to the gear vendor to upgrade and augment capacity of the wireline network to enable it to handle increasing data traffic, ET had reported.

Huawei is already supplying LTE base stations and other equipment for Vodafone’s 4G networks in Karnataka and Kerala circles, besides expanding the telco’s 3G network in these two circles.

Over the last 12 months, Huawei has also won 4G deals from Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular. The gear maker has deployed 4G LTE network for Airtel in Delhi, along with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu service areas, which are the telco’s biggest telecom circles in the country.

It is also supplying base stations and other equipment for the Aditya Birla group-owned Idea’s 4G networks in Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Orissa circles.

Vodafone India - Huawei bags 0-0 mn managed services, network operations deal from Vodafone India | ET Telecom
 
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