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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Biddle who wrote (32558)	2/18/2003 6:47:19 AM
From: John Biddle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 196972

Motorola Seeks Second Spot in Mobile Networks Tue February 18, 2003 05:38 AM ET By Lucas van Grinsven asia.reuters.com CANNES, France (Reuters) - U.S.-based Motorola aims to become a clear number two supplier of wireless phone networks globally, expanding its offering and hoping that in 2004 its market will start to grow again. "At some point the downwards capex trend will turn. Our outlook is that in 2004 modest growth will return to the wireless network market," Adrian Nemcek, executive vice president Motorola's mobile networks, told Reuters in an interview on the fringes of the 3GSM mobile trade show here. His expectation is based on slowly rising demand for third generation networks and new subscribers. Market pundits expect 2.7 billion mobile phone users by 2010, up from one billion now. No longer does he expect a tidal wave of demand for fast third generation networks. "It's looking more like slow-rolling growth. "Real mass commercialization of UMTS (3G) we're talking about 2004 or 2005." He acknowledged it was probably too ambitious to dethrone market leader Ericsson of Sweden in GSM mobile networks, the world's most popular system used in Europe and parts of Asia and the Americas, or U.S.-based Lucent which leads in the rivaling CDMA standard. "But our goal is to break out of the trap and become the clear number two," he added. Motorola is now among a group of four or five suppliers, behind Ericsson and Lucent. He expected to achieve this goal by focusing on growth markets like China and India. A potential threat for continued low capital investments was an intermediate network technology called Edge which operators in Europe are increasingly interested in to save investments in costly full-fledged third generation (3G) networks. If carriers upgrade to Edge rather than so-called UMTS, they could save money, he said. "Operators are inquiring. Edge has lower capex," he said. But he added he still expected the impact on overall global capital investments to be small. MORE SALES DECLINES THIS YEAR Nemcek said he shares views of those analysts who expect investments in wireless networks to fall by up to 12 percent this year, after a 20 percent drop to some $39 billion last year. Meanwhile, he said he had already signed up several commercial customers for a new product Motorola was offering: switches needed to guide mobile voice and data traffic on to the wireline telephone and Internet. He decline to name customer names, but said announcements were pending. Until Motorola was only active in the radio base stations that connect handsets to the network. The continued delays of European 3G UMTS networks, initially planned to be launched in 2001, was good news for the rivaling CDMA systems, called 1x. "Maybe CDMA 1x wouldn't have been so popular if UMTS hadn't been delayed," he said, pointing at Japan where the country's leading operator NTT DoCoMo had signed up less than 300,000 customers in more than a year while rival KDDI signed up five million users of its CDMA 1x in less time.