MobileMonday Global

^{USD 100 million join venture} Siemens, Huawei jointly to develop TD-SCDMA

Siemens AG and Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. signed a memorandum of understanding to form a joint venture to develop, manufacture and market TD-SCDMA technology. The new one-hundred-million dollar company will be based in Beijing, with Siemens holding 51 percent of the venture and Huawei holding the remaining 49 percent. TD-SCDMA has strong backing from Chinese government. It hopes to protect its markets for domestic companies by choosing a different network standard. TS-SCDMA is one of the air interfaces ITU has approved for 3g-standard networks. Siemens and another Chinese company Datang Technologies have been main developers of TD-SCDMA technology. Siemens says its investment in the new 3g-network technology is up to 170 million. “Both Siemens Mobile and Huawei Technologies are confident that TD-SCDMA succeeds in the Chinese market and could encourage operators outside of China to adopt the standard,” Siemens said, citing the technology’s ability to handle standalone networks for large geographic coverage and to provide complementary solutions to GSM and W-CDMA networks. Manufacturing and marketing efforts of the joint venture will be focused on China, but later on also on wider markets, says Siemens. Siemens promises that the first commercial products will be available in China at the beginning of 2004.

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