Major players in China’s IT and telecommunication industries signed deals Tuesday to buy equipment from U.S. vendors worth a total of around US$2.3 billion, the companies said. The deals were signed at a seminar on telecommunications and IT trade in Washington.
Motorola Inc. won two large mobile telephony deals: a US$556 million contract with China United Telecommunication Corp. (China Unicom) to expand its Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA ) mobile networks in Beijing and 12 other provinces; and a US$510 million contract with China Mobile Communications Corp. to expand its Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) network and improve data services in Beijing and 13 provinces, Motorola said in statements.
The two mobile carriers also awarded contracts worth US$350 million to Lucent Technologies Inc. in the area of packet-switched networking and advanced multimedia communications services, Lucent said in a statement.
The two carriers also signed contracts with Cisco Systems Inc., the U.S.-based Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) said. PC manufacturers Legend Group Ltd. and Founder Group signed deals with Intel. Other U.S. companies that signed deals were UTStarcom Inc. and Nortel Networks Inc., TIA said.
China’s official Xinhua news agency quoted Lou Qinjian, Vice Minister of China’s Ministry of Information Industry, as saying that the deals demonstrated China’s sincerity in addressing the trade imbalance between the two sides, which the U.S. estimates to be around US$125 billion in 2003
The two countries should work together to solve the issues of trade imbalance by establishing a mechanism of communication and cooperation, rather than imposing restrictions on trade, Xinhua quoted Lou as saying.
