China Unicom announces WCDMA winners

January 26, 2017

China Unicom has announced the winning bidders in its first WCDMA infrastructure tender.

Huawei, Motorola and Ericsson are the biggest winners, whilst smaller contracts went to ZTE, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Alcatel-Lucent.

The tender is believed to cover 55 cities in 30 provinces, and is the first stage in a 282 city rollout of the 3G technology.

Huawei, who will carry out their work in co-operation with Motorola, won 30.6% of the tender.

Swedish giant Ericsson and its partners, New Postcom and Fiberhome, took a 25.6% share.

ZTE secured 21.5% of the tender, despite it being the weakest of the bidders in the WCDMA market.

Nokia Siemens network took 11.1%, whilst Alcatel-Lucent secured 10.2%.

The financial value of this portion of the rollout is not yet known.

The Chinese government plans to invest 280 billion yuan ($31 billion) in 3G technologies in 2017 and 2018.