NEC Corp., Japan's largest personal- computer maker, forecast sales of equipment and software services to carriers will increase 43 percent in three years as telecommunications companies upgrade their networks.

Revenue in the business will rise to 1 trillion yen ($9.3 billion) in the year ending March 2011, from 700 billion last fiscal year, Nobuhiro Endo, NEC's associate senior vice president in charge of the mobile-network operations unit, said in a Bloomberg Television interview broadcast today. The operations accounted for 15 percent of the company's sales last fiscal year.

NEC is looking to tap the demand for base stations that accommodate faster data-transfer speeds as mobile devices are increasingly used to download video clips and surf the Internet. Carriers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., China Mobile Ltd. and Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc. plan to begin commercial operation of the new network as early as this year.

Tokyo-based NEC in February said it would form a venture later this year with Alcatel-Lucent SA, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, to develop wireless-broadband equipment based on the Long Term Evolution, or LTE, technology. The companies plan to introduce it with mobile-phone operators in Japan and North America starting in 2009 and 2010.

The market for LTE, which is based on the current high-speed mobile technology, will grow to more than 400 million users by 2015, NEC forecast in February. The value of the market will exceed 2.1 billion euros ($3.3 billion) by 2012, it said.

Fujitsu Ltd., Japan's biggest computer-services provider, this month said it plans to generate about $1 billion in revenue from high-speed wireless base stations within five years. The company may capture 20 percent of the 550 billion yen global market for LTE and rival WiMax technologies in the year to March 2013, it said at the time.

Source:Bloomberg