The worldwide mobile infrastructure market revenue contracted 9 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2009 despite a record number of 3G base station shipments, according to a recently published report by Dell’Oro Group. The GSM market experienced its largest year-over-year decline as Chinese mobile operators focused on 3G network deployments.
“The three Chinese mobile operators plan to spend over $20 billion this year on rolling out the initial phases of their 3G deployments,” stated Scott Siegler, Senior Analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “China Unicom’s WCDMA deployment is shaping up to be the single largest 3G deployment in history and was the primary contributor to the most ever — 100 thousand — Node B shipments in the quarter. With the CDMA market declining elsewhere around the world, China Telecom’s spending resulted in the most CDMA base station shipments in over four years. As the two GSM operators, China Mobile and China Telecom focused their spending on the rapid deployment of their 3G networks, spending on their GSM networks significantly declined. We expect this spending to accelerate in the second half of the year,” finished Siegler.
During the quarter, Huawei and ZTE experienced the greatest rate of growth, almost doubling their combined share of the total infrastructure market to over 20 percent compared to the same quarter last year.
