Huawei, the world’s third-largest mobile kit vendor, has forecast that WiMAX equipment sales will double over the next two years. “This year it will be around US$500 million… and next year it should be around US$1 billion,” said Zhao Ming, Huawei’s head of CDMA and WiMAX operations, in an interview with Reuters. He said the vendor only recorded about US$150 million in WiMAX equipment sales in 2007, but that lower prices were now driving the market into the mainstream. “You can now find terminal prices of under US$100,” he said. According to the report, WiMAX hardware cost about US$1,000 per customer four years ago but had shrunk to around US$200-US$250 by last year. “The growth will come from Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” Zhao added.

Zhao also claimed that Huawei was on track to win around 25 percent of China Mobile’s latest 3G TD-SCDMA bid. The country’s three mobile operators are planning to spend an estimated US$58.5 billion rolling out the new networks over the next couple of years. Zhao said that Huawei has deployed 62,000 CDMA base stations for China Telecom in the past 18 months, which has lifted its share of CDMA equipment sales to 38.9 percent currently compared to just 3 percent last year.