Singapore’s StarHub revamps management team
Singapore’s second largest operator StarHub has appointed a new CFO, CMO and chief strategic partnerships officer (CSPO).

Dennis Chia, joining from semiconductor packing and testing firm STATS ChipPAC, will take over as CFO. Howie Lau, VP of corporate development at Lenovo’s Worldwide Finance Organisation, was named CMO, while Jeannie Ong, the current CMO, will take up the newly created position of CSPO.

The appointments will be effective from 8 July.

Huawei signs $500M supply deal with STMicro
China telecoms equipment vendor Huawei has signed a five-year, $500 million supply agreement with French chipmaker STMicro.

Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang signed the deal during a visit to France, Reuters reported.

Huawei didn’t respond to an inquiry about the scope of the agreement, which is expected to boost orders from the French company.

Brightstar brings Xiaomi’s Mi 4 to Thailand
Fast-rising Xiaomi has signed a distribution agreement with Brightstar to launch the Chinese vendor’s Mi 4 in Thailand.

Brightstar, a specialised wireless distributor, said the Mi 4 is priced at THB10,990 ($325) and is available from AIS, dtac and True Move, as well as TG Fone, online partner Lazada and open-market partner STREK.

The Mi 4 features a stainless steel frame and includes the Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM and a 5-inch full HD display.

Brightstar Thailand general manager Anish Prasad said it has seen a strong response for the Mi 4 based on pre-orders.

East Asia to take bigger slice of M2M market by 2019
Greater China, Japan and South Korea are forecast to account for 22 per cent of global cellular M2M connections by 2019, up from 15 per cent last year.

Juniper Research found that strong efforts by China’s major operators, particularly in smart metering and connected cars, will drive the rise of connected devices in China. However, traditional M2M markets in North America and western Europe will retain the majority of connected device revenues, it noted.

The surge in China, the research firm said, has been aided by State Grid Corporation’s plan to spend $68.7 billion in smart grid technologies this year.

Greater China includes Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

Juniper Research forecasts that the global M2M sector will generate service revenues of over $40 billion by 2019.

Alcatel-Lucent wins $1.3B deals in China
Alcatel-Lucent has signed one-year deals with China Mobile and China Unicom that will see the vendor support both operators’ move to cloud-based networks.

The China Mobile deal is worth CNY4.53 billion ($728 million) while the China Unicom deal is valued at CNY3.59 billion ($579 million).

Alcatel-Lucent will deliver its mobile and fixed ultra-broadband access, IP routing, agile optical networking and network functions virtualisation (NFV) capabilities, as well as Nuage Networks’ software defined networking (SDN) technologies.

The vendor said the deployment of these technologies will support China Mobile and China Unicom in meeting commitments to the ‘Broadband China’ initiative, which aims to see full broadband coverage across the nation’s rural and urban areas by 2020.