Motorola Bags $15m Andhra Order

Motorola's cellular infrastructure group has won an order to supply 50,000 fixed wireless telephones to the Andhra Pradesh basic telecom licencee, Tata Teleservices.

The order _ to be executed over three years _ is estimated to be worth about $15 million (more than Rs 60 crore), sources said.

This is the second order to supply the CDMA (code division multiple access)-based telephones that the US electronics-to-telecom major's has bagged. Motorola earlier won a similar order from Madhya Pradesh basic telecom licensee, Bharti Telenet.

Most of the basic telecom licensees in India are opting for CDMA-based wireless technologies to roll out their service in the circles they are licenced in because of the savings in deployment time and the early flow of revenues.

This is the second major order that the cellular infrastructure group of Motorola has won this calendar year. In February, it announced that it had won an order to set up 100 radio base stations for Hutchison Max Telecom Ltd (HMTL), the cellular telecom licensee in Mumbai.

The order was estimated to be worth $10-$15 million (Rs 38-57 crore, at the currency exchange rates prevailing then.)

The new base stations were to take up the capacity of the HMTL Mumbai network from 150,000 to some 250,000. The order took the total number of wireless contracts that Motorola has bagged in India to 20. These included `repeat orders' from Sterling Cellular, BPL Mobile and Usha Martin, besides HMTL.

After the initial equipment orders from cellular telecom operators, the market has been inactive until the repeat orders of the companies came up. The first operators to expand the capacity of their networks had been the ones in the metropolitan cities.

Motorola is estimated to have bagged cellular infrastructure orders worth some $400 million since 1996 when cellular services started in the country. The $28.9-billion major and Swedish telecom giant Ericsson AB are market-leaders in the Indian cellular equipment market.

The Motorola contracts do not include switching equipment as the US major does not manufacture it. It has partnered with Siemens.

Together with Siemens, Motorola has contracts in four cricles; two with Nokia and eight with Ericsson. In one of its largest deals in the country, Motorola bagged a $100 million (Rs 360 crore) order from Reliance Cellular to set up the radio network in the seven circles that latter holds licences in.