Chinese vendor Huawei has scored a managed services deal with local carrier China Unicom, the company said Tuesday.

Huawei will work with Unicom subsidiary Shanghai Unicom, providing managed services for more than 50 per cent of Shanghai Unicom’s base station sites over 11 districts of Shanghai.

With a population of over 23 million, Shanghai is one of the most populous cities in the world and Huawei will provide preventive, planned and corrective maintenance services for Unicom’s network.

China Unicom is the country’s second largest operator with 172 million subscribers at the end of March. The vast majority of those are on GSM but almost 17.5 million are on WCDMA 3G subscriptions.

Managed services is an area of increasing importance for telecoms vendors as their reliance on kit sales becomes unsustainable. While leading vendors such as Ericsson have established significant services businesses, one of the criticisms levelled at newer players like Huawei and ZTE is that their services offering is under developed.