Things to come..The quadrennial ITU Telecom World show in Geneva may be a worldwide confab, but one global trend has a lot of people worried. Occupying prime real estate smack in the middle of the exhibition hall are booths from two of the fastest-growing communications-equipment makers on the planet, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp., both based in mainland China. While telecom's old guard -- Lucent Technologies (LU ), Nortel Networks (NT ), Alcatel (ALA ), Ericsson (ERICY ), Siemens (SI ), Motorola (MOT ), and others -- fight to stave off flat or declining sales, these ambitious Chinese upstarts are logging revenue gains up to 30% annually.
Here's a scenario sure to ruffle some feathers: While the old telecom giants continuing moving up into services and other "knowledge-based" businesses, companies like Huawei and ZTE could grab a growing share of the global communications-equipment market. It seems far-fetched, but perhaps by the time of the next Telecom show in 2006 or 2007, Lucent will once again have a booth -- highlighting its transformation into the world's largest distributor and integrator of Hauwei boxes. Anybody want to place a bet?
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