In fiscal 2002–03, India once again proved that it is an exception to the global equipment gloom. Though slowing down a bit from the 21.6 percent growth in fiscal 2001–02, the communications equipment industry still clocked an impressive 10 percent growth during the fiscal 2002–03.

Among the many trends in the last fiscal, one particularly stood out: whether in the carrier space, enterprise space or among consumers, wireless was the flavor of the year. In the carrier space, there were intensive wireless equipment deployments to enable the launch of a host of new operations during the year. BSNL, Reliance Infocomm, Tata Teleservices, Bharti Televentures, Hutch, and Idea carried out heavy deployments throughout the year. A large part of last year’s carrier equipment sales came from wireless equipment, which somewhat compensated for the abysmal fall in revenues of the previous year’s mega performer segment, telecom cables.

In the enterprise space, large banks, insurance companies, state governments, schools, MNCs, and hotels stepped up their wireless implementations during the year. Implementations were both for networking within premises as well as external building-to-building connectivity. Wireless equipment ranging from wireless cards to GHz radios were implemented.

The fastest growing equipment segment during the fiscal was that of mobile handsets. Value-wise, GSM handsets market grew by a whopping 78.07 percent to post revenues of Rs 1,795 crore. Considering it was a relatively new market, CDMA handsets saw even more spectacular growth, touching sales revenues of Rs 559.4 crore in 2002–03.

The others segments that put up a good show during the fiscal were call center/voice solutions, network storage, network integration services, network security, VoIP, and test and measurement. Segments that performed badly include telecom cables, low-end LAN products, modems, and VSATs.

Reflecting the sterling performance of anything wireless, four of the Top 10 equipment vendors during last fiscal were companies having extensive range of wireless service provider infrastructure equipment. Lucent Technologies, the numero uno equipment provider, focused on both GSM as well as CDMA infrastructure. Ericsson had the largest client base as far as cellular infrastructure in India is concerned. Motorola, like Lucent, also plays in the GSM as well as CDMA infrastructure space, apart from selling mobile handsets. SPCNL also focuses heavily on GSM infrastructure equipment, and sells mobile phones too.

Three telecom turnkey providers also figure in this year’s Top 10 club. ITI, which has consistently topped our equipment list in the past, returned a negative growth in sales revenues during the last year and was pushed to the second spot. The other two turnkey providers, HFCL and TCIL did not fare well either. They also announced negative growths in their sales revenue, and hence experienced a setback in their rankings this year.

Despite a bad year for the cash-cow networking segments like LAN switches and routers, Cisco grew its revenue quite impressively during the fiscal 2002–03, thus retaining its last year’s No. 5 slot. This, it did by performing well in new segments, and by opening up new revenue channels.

Another enterprise networking equipment player that figures in this year’s Top 10 list is Wipro, which despite a lackluster NI performance, was able to secure a place in the select list, courtesy revenues from telecom software exports. TCS too figures in the Top 10 list, entirely due to telecom software. However, a not-so-strong growth in telecom software exports, which is still recuperating from a global telecom equipment slowdown, did not allow these companies to siege a top slot in the overall ranking.

Pravin Prashant and Nareshchandra Laishram