To tap the full potential of the growing Indian market, Chinese telecom equipment company Huawei Technologies has renewed focus on the country by identifying new verticals and business units for 2011-12.

Huawei?s enterprise business, which clocked global contract sales worth $2 billion in 2010 and is one of the four strategic groups of the company, is one such area from where the company expects $100 million sales from India in 2011. Besides, it will expand the headcount in the enterprise business to 500 from the present 100. Globally, Huawei plans to increase its headcount by 26,000 to 1.1 lakh strength of which 45% is in the research and development (R&D) space. ?India?s share in the enterprise business is very small and hence, we didn?t have a dedicated sales team for it till last year but now we are ramping up the manpower, sales and infrastructure there. The manpower investment will depend on the market potential and the country?s contribution in the next five years,? said Dabing He, president, marketing, enterprise business group, Huawei.

The Chinese firm launched its enterprise business in 2010 to provide network infrastructure, fixed and wireless communication, data centre, and cloud computing solutions for global telecommunications customers and aims to increase enterprise sales to $4 billion in 2011 and $15 billion by 2016 of which 20% revenues would come from Internet protocol equipment and solutions.

Huawei?s enterprise business is made up of five business units ? IP products, communication technologies (CT) products, information technology (IT) products, industry solutions department and services department. While network infrastructure includes routers and security products, enterprise communication refers to unified communication and video conferencing solutions whereas data centre services include servers and storage. He added that Huawei competes with Cisco on the Telepresence and IP front and with Avaya on Unified Communications.

It plans to launch its new end-to-end Telepresence 2.0 in July this year that would consume lower bandwidth and could prove to be a boon for India where bandwidth shortage is a problem.

?The market share of IP equipment in India would be similar to that of Cisco in five years. We are stepping up the enterprise business as our customers are doing so and also because the traditional IT and CT technologies are converging,? he added. Incidentally, the company had announced an investment of $2 billion in India for a span of five years (2011-16) for ramping up sales operations, CSR programmes, R&D centre in Bangalore and a new manufacturing facility in Chennai which currently manufactures only optical equipment but will become an end-to-end facility.

The facility is expected to be complete by next year. Employing over 2,000 professionals, Huawei has set up marketing, sales, service and engineering support offices at Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, among other cities in India.

As for the industry segments, other than telecom operators, Huawei services government, public utilities, finance, energy, power and transport verticals. The firm is interested in providing the IT construction for universities, government and transport sectors in India besides finding new vertical interests.

On the operator market front, India margins for Huawei are less than the overseas margins and the company has not seen profitability on its key performance indicators in India.

(Travel for this report was sponsored by Huawei)