New Delhi, Despite security concerns raised about the use of Chinese telecom equipment in India, ZTE Corporation today said it is mulling a manufacturing plant in the country to tap into the growing market, especially 3G services.
"We are planning to build a manufacturing plant in India, but the plan is still at feasibility stage," said ZTE Corporation Director Qiu Shaoling.
"The most preferable place to set-up the plant would be in Chennai, which is well connected, but all this depends on the regulatory approvals from the Government of India and demand of the industry," Shaoling added.
ZTE, a leading global provider of telecom equipment and network solutions, has a wholly owned subsidiary ZTE India.
On whether the manufacturing plant will only cater to the Indian market, Shaoling said, "Primarily it will be for the Indian market and later on it might be used for exports."
Last year, the government had banned Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei and ZTE due to security concerns. Later, however, they were allowed to sell telecom equipment to Indian operators.
The telecom ministry has created a list of core equipment for mandatory security clearance such as call servers, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, LAN switches, media gateways, MSC servers, mobile switching centres and routers.
The security issue was initially raised by the Home Ministry, which voiced concerns that Chinese telecom equipment for India may have embedded spyware, giving intelligence agencies in that country access to India''s telecom networks.
ZTE started operations in India in 1999, offering products for wireline, wireless and other services. It has a very wide product range in India, including fixed/wireless network, terminals and services.
Products with technologies likes Dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and DSL broadband have 50 and 30 per cent market share in India.
Its GSM products are used by operators like Reliance, Tata, Idea, Aircel, among others.