Telecom Lead Asia: Chris Houghton, the new head of Ericsson India, will assume charges on Monday.

Chris moved to India from UK, where he was the head of Customer Unit UK and Ireland and managing director Ericsson UK.

Chris, a member of the Ericsson Global Leadership Team (GLT), succeeds Fredrik Jejdling, who assumed the role as head of Region sub-Saharan Africa.

The new India head will report to Mats Olsson, chairman of region India and senior vice president Asia-Pacific.

Chris will work to extend Ericsson’s footprint in the region and assisting customers in their work to capture value in a rapidly transforming telecoms market.

In Q4 2012, Ericsson India posted 5 percent increase in revenue to SEK 1.6 billion. For the full year of 2012, Ericsson India’s revenue declined 34 percent to SEK 6.5 billion, primarily due to less Capex spend by local mobile service providers.

Ericsson India experienced continued low activity levels with operator investments only in certain areas. Data traffic is growing from a low base as smartphones and tablets become more affordable. Growth in Support Solutions y-o-y was driven by Telcordia.

In Q4 2012, Ericsson India generated SEK 0.9 billion revenue from networks business, SEK 0.6 billion from global services and SEK 0.1 billion from support solutions.

Ericsson India said the full year decrease is mainly due to large initial 3G deployments in the first three quarters of 2011.

With full year revenue of $35.75 billion in 2012 Ericsson continues to dominate the telecom equipment market against Huawei’s $35.43 billion income.

Interestingly, the year 2013 is seeing top level changes at leading telecom equipment vendors in India. Huawei, ZTE and Cisco have appointed new CEOs in the country.

Due to lower Capex by telecom operators in 2013, all telecom equipment vendors are looking for improving revenue growth and profitability in the region.

For instance, India’s #1 telecom operator Airtel will focus more on revenue generation than telecom Capex this year. Airtel is going to lower its Capex in India this year. Airtel’s total Capex for telecom infrastructure in FY 2014 will be around $2.2 billion against $2.5 billion in FY 2013.

Baburajan K
[email protected]