EXCLUSIVE: Chinese vendor Huawei is eyeing dominance of a global LTE network market that it expects to grow to more than 140 commercial operator deployments by the end of this year.

In an exclusive video interview with Mobile World Live, Ying Wei Min, President of GSM, UMTS and LTE networks at Huawei, noted that this rapid growth will build on the “more than 80 [LTE] networks launched globally” to date, fuelled by booming demand for mobile broadband services.

Huawei’s networks head said that the company has already provided kit for 38 of those 80 network launches, and has more than 80 contracts in the bag; “now we are number one or number two for most regions,” claimed Ying Wei Min. Among the success stories he cited for Huawei are the company becoming the first vendor to deliver digital dividend LTE networks in Germany, and a deal to supply Japan’s SoftBank with the "world’s largest" TD-LTE network (officially known as AXGP but SoftBank has said the network is "basically the same as TD-LTE" and compatible with the international TD-LTE ecosystem). “I think for the next few years we can see even bigger success for global market expansion,” he noted confidently, while admitting that the company has some work to do in North America.

Elsewhere in the interview Ying Wei Min revealed progress around development of LTE-Advanced technology; the business impact on the vendor community of operators choosing to pool their resources and share networks; and why the area of managed services is becoming lucrative for traditional mobile infrastructure providers.


View the full interview here.