China's leading telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei Technologies announced on Friday that it had agreed a series of contracts in Africa earlier this month which will help accelerate its expansion in the continent's market.

The contracts, worth a total of US$442 million, came from Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria's major telecom operators.

The co-operation with African operators mainly covers a wide range of Huawei products and solutions including 3G (third generation of mobile telecommunications), NGN (next generation networks), optical transmission, switches, routers and intelligent networks.

Huawei won a US$34 million bid from Kenya's biggest mobile operator Safaricom to reconstruct and update the company's intelligent network on November 1, the company said.

"We chose Huawei as our partner not only because of Huawei's advantage in providing cost-effective products and solutions, but also its sound service-provisioning and research and development capability," said Michael Joseph, president of Safaricom.

Huawei outperformed a number of leading Western telecom gear suppliers for the bid.

Joseph said he is confident of Huawei's technical strength and regards Huawei the best in the field of intelligent network service provisioning.

Huawei also signed two other contracts last Wednesday with Zimbabwe's state-owned fixed-line operator TEL*ONE and mobile operator NET*ONE, which are worth US$288 million and US$40 million respectively.

According to Huawei, it will provide TEL*ONE with network expansion and optimization solutions, including switches, national transmission backbone, CDMA (code division multiple access), intelligent networks and data communications products.

When the project is completed, the capacity of TEL*ONE's fixed network is expected to increase by 500,000 users.

The project will also help Zimbabwe build advanced national backbone transmission and datacom networks.

In another project with NET*ONE, Huawei will provide another entire set of GSM systems and services in addition to the existing 170,000 GSM lines that Huawei provided early this year.

In another development, Huawei signed a contract with Vmobile, Nigeria's second largest mobile operator, on Monday.

According to the agreement, Huawei will provide GSM base stations worth US$80 million to Vmobile.

Huawei will also help deploy GSM wireless equipment across 15 of Nigeria's 36 states, whereby Huawei is about to acquire another substantial market share of Nigeria's telecom market in addition to the 40 per cent market share it has gained when serving as the partner of Nigeria's largest mobile operator MTN.

In the meantime, Huawei signed an agreement with the Communications Ministry of Nigeria to co-operate in a number of fields including fixed network, mobile communications, optical transmission and data communications.

To fulfil this aim, Huawei invested US$7 million to establish a multi-product training centre in the capital of Nigeria, which started in August.

"Meeting customer demand and providing leading technologies and solutions are of pivotal importance to survive the fierce international competition,"said Sun Yafang, board chairwoman of Huawei Technologies.

She said the lower price, which used to be a major factor for Chinese companies in terms of withstanding fierce market competition is no longer a good selling point.

Huawei has been developing its African market since 1999 and now has around 30 branch offices in Africa. Its products are used in almost 40 African countries.

(China Daily November 13, 2004)