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Mr Carl-Henric Svanberg, President

Thomas K Thomas

New Delhi, May 17 With Ericsson set to bag major contracts worth multi-billion dollars from Indian operators including BSNL, the Swedish telecom equipment manufacturer is increasing its investments in India apart from making it the global hub for managed services and outsourcing.

Speaking to Business Line, Mr Carl-Henric Svanberg, President and CEO of Ericsson, said, “We are investing here. This is a very good place to be for us. This has been the home country, if you like, for managed services and outsourcing. It is where this concept started and here we receive a lot of tasks that can be done cross border.”

“The logical thing for us is to do part of services work that can be done cross border. There are networks, for example, where the whole site optimisation work can be done here, without anybody even going to the country to optimise for. R&D is another area. We have 280 people now – in Chennai and Gurgaon which will probably double in another few years,” he added.

When asked whether Ericsson was looking at making India the hub for some of its global activities, Mr Svanberg said, “We are moving in that direction and we have more and more activities to outsource. But, if you see all the big companies whether it is IBM, or Huawei, it is here. India has become a country where there is a lot of outsourcing skills being developed. For Ericsson, the network operations centre that we have in India roughly handles about 11 customers. But it doesn’t work that way that whole network is run from a place. It may be optimisation work or it may be networking operations that could be outsourced here, but it’s seldom the whole thing.”

On the choice between WiMax and third generation technologies for broadband access, Mr Svanberg said globally a number of players are giving up on WiMax. He, however, said that it should be left to the market forces to dictate the choice of technology. “When we took a decision not to do WiMax, it’s just that since the HSPA technology will be the dominant technology — and it would have been a little bit odd for us to not be spending a lot of money developing one technology that makes up a bigger part of the world versus spend the same amount of money to just develop a similar technology once again that has no difference for any user. So, for us, it was just a business rational not to be involved in WiMax. It will be best if we leave it to the market forces to dictate the choice of technology for India.”

More Stories on : Telecommunications | Outlook | Outsourcing

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