ZTE Corporation said its profit rose 27.8 percent to RMB 1.21 billion or $175 million, and revenue increased 17.8 percent to RMB 25.75 billion or $3.74 billion in the first quarter of 2017.

ZTE’s research and development accounted for almost 13 percent of quarterly revenue in the first three months of the current year.

ZTE said its Pre5G products are deployed in more than 40 networks in 30 countries. ZTE will begin 5G pre-commercial deployments in the third-quarter of 2018, with full commercial deployment starting in 2019. ZTE’s network virtualization solutions are deployed in more than 180 networks globally, and the company this year unveiled the world’s first Carrier DevOps platform.

ZTE has gained 70 percent market share in a recent annual tender by China Mobile for data center servers.

ZTE posted more than 25 percent growth in shipments of set-top-boxes in the first quarter.

ZTE is gaining market share in Rich Communications Suite (RCS) and Cloud-Computing solutions, as the company leverages innovations in network cloudification and artificial intelligence.

ZTE is leading the market in the development of Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) services, and was the first vendor to release a pre-commercial NB-IoT based smart-parking system. ZTE said its self-developed chipsets posted 70 percent growth in shipments in the first quarter.

ZTE has won Smart City technology projects in China, as well as in western European markets including Germany and France.