Nokia gets a bunch more cash from Chinese operators

Nokia is so keen for everyone to know how well it’s doing in China that is it makes an announcement every time it wins some business.

Earlier this year we heard all about a ‘framework agreement’ signed with China mobile that was worth around €1 billion. Today Nokia has announced some more ‘frame agreements’, which are presumably the same thing and refer to a kind of pre-contract that amounts to a formal commitment to do a bunch of business in future.

This time we’re talking €2 billion, but split between all three Chinese MNOs – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom. Presumably the China Mobile bit is fresh cash, not just a recycling of the previous bil. The agreements cover delivery for the next year or so of radio, fixed access, IP routing and optical transport equipment, as well as some SDN and NFV goodness. Nokia is excited by all this transitioning and leveraging.

“We are excited to continue our close collaboration with these important customers in China, to drive new levels of network performance as they transition toward 5G,” said Mike Wang, president of Nokia Shanghai Bell. “Leveraging the breadth of our end-to-end network and services capabilities, we will work closely with China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom to deploy technologies that meet their specific business needs.”

It wouldn’t be surprising to see some kind of equivalent announcement by Ericsson before long as the two Nordic kit vendors clearly like to compete over this sort of thing. Not long after its first China Mobile announcement Nokia said it was getting £3.5 billion from T-Mobile US to help out with 5G. Within a few weeks Ericsson had countered with an almost identical announcement of its own.