Huawei has won a managed services contract worth $180-$220 million from Vodafone India for a period of three years, spanning several telecom circles.
The Chinese equipment maker will deliver managed services and improve network operations of Vodafone in Kerala, Tamil Nadu & Chennai and Odisha circles by replacing Nokia, its Finnish rival.
Meanwhile, Huaweil will also offer network operations in Andhra Pradesh and Delhi, where Nokia will continue delivering managed services.
Under the deal, along-with a fraction of current Vodafone and Huawei on-roll employees, third-party employees working with the existing vendor will also move to Huawei, in all summing to approx 1,000 employees.
Vodafone had also previously rewarded Huawei with a $150 million pan-India deal to upgrade and augment the capacity of the wireline network, enabling handling of increasing data traffic.
Under the deal, the latter is supplying LTE base stations and other equipment for Vodafone 4G networks in Karnataka and Kerala circles, alongside 3G network expansion in both.
For Huaweil, the deal with Vodafone comes shortly after it signed a similar partnership with current market leader Bharti Airtel for wireline network enhancement with vectoring, GPON and G.Fast technologies which led to the carrier launching 100 Mbps broadband services in 87 cities.
Huawei entered into the Indian telecom services scenario, previously dominated by Ericsson and Nokia, with a Rs 1,200 crore managed services and network modernization deal from Telenor India, late bagging a deal for managing four telecom circles for Aircel.
Huawei also acquired 4G deals from Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular having deployed 4G LTE network for Airtel in Delhi, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and supplied base stations and other equipment for Idea 4G networks in Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Odisha circles.
As the after-effect of Reliance Jio, Vodafone had announced to invest $3-billion, or Rs 20,100 crore in India.
The England-based carrier also topped the recent spectrum auction and acquired net 2 x 82.6 MHz FDD and 200 MHz TDD spectrum in all its key telecom circles investing Rs 20,280 crore approx.
The spectrum acquired has a 20-year term with the airwaves providing high-capacity, multi-band 4G capability operating across 1800, 2100 and 2500 MHz bands, enabling Vodafone with 4G capability in 17 circles.
Vodafone, with a subscriber base at 200.1 million in August 2016, recently entered a three-year contract with Ericsson to manage optical fibre networks in 10 telecom circles.
Vodafone also revealed plans to list its Indian unit in an initial public offering expected to rise between $2 billion and $3 billion.
Vodafone announced a net investment of Rs 47,700 crore in its Indian arm since April.
Vina Krishnan
editor@telecomlead.com
