Alcatel-Lucent start integrating India units
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 04 December 2006, 18:30 IST
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Mumbai: The recent global merger of French equipment giant Alcatel and USA's Lucent resulted in integration of their India and South Asia units and operations. All employees of Lucent in India have been absorbed in Alcatel-Lucent. The merged entity has over 4,500 employees across manufacturing, R&D and sales and marketing in India. The Alcatel-Lucent combine has also chalked out plans to ramp up their India operations. According to Ravi Sharma, Alcatel-Lucent president for South Asia, who was earlier the president of Alcatel’s activities in South Asia, the company would together be a comprehensive network equipment provider in telecom, broadband, submarine cables, IPTV, manufacturing and also the research and development space in India. "Till now, we were offering only GSM and Lucent was providing CDMA equipment. We can now provide the whole product range to players like MTNL, BSNL and Reliance Communications, which use both the technologies," says Sharma. The entities of Alcatel and Lucent in India, including Alcatel South Asia are being restructured. Alcatel’s strength was in areas of GSM infrastructure, equipment for transmission and broadband, development and implementation, while Lucent specialized in CDMA technology, including optical, data and wireless networking and telephone switching. The Alcatel-Lucent combination will focus on major key areas – wireless, broadband, enterprise and submarine cable segments in the country. With most Indian operator having submarine cables, the company sees growth potential in this area. "We are greared up to meet the demands and will bid for the BSNL and MTNL’s proposed joint undersea cables to West Asia and Singapore. Also the agreement with Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) for providing cellular equipment to BSNL and the partnership with C-Dot for the WiMax R&D facility would remain the same," he informed. Alcatel-Lucent has manufacturing facilities in Bangalore and Gurgaon and R&D centers in Noida, Gurgaon, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Alcatel’s international service center in Mumbai will be renamed as Alcatel-Lucent learning center and its capacity will be expanded to 200 engineers from 60 currently.

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