Emerging economies create emerging vendors

Emerging economies’ telecom deals may be creating a new wave of key players, absent some of the usual names. The recent action in China and India show that where an emerging economy invests in telecom infrastructure, the deals are weighted toward access, metro and fiber, and less to the high-flying switching/routing. Package bids that involve a range of products are also more common. This favors players like Alcatel-Lucent, whose broad portfolio of access products and metro solutions got it attention in India, but also price-leader players like Huawei and ZTE. We believe it is likely that there will be pressure put on Cisco, Juniper, Tellabs, Ciena and other more narrowly focused players to partner or even merge to counter the trend.