Hard Sell

DOMESTIC TELECOM EQUIPMENT MAKERS WANT A BAN ON FOREIGN TELECOM VENDORS, BUT THEY WILL FIND IT CHALLENGING TO CONVINCE BUYERS AT HOME.

- Manu Kaushik And Joe C. Mathew

The growing distrust between local telecom equipment makers and their foreign counterparts is apparent. This writer met N.K. Goyal, Chairman of the Telecom Equipment Manufacturers Association of India (TEMA) – a group representing 150-odd local telecom gear makers, at the latter’s office in New Delhi. For the first few minutes, he was reluctant to speak, and decided to speak on record only after verifying the identity through online searches. Once he started, there was no stopping him, as he detailed the pain points preventing local vendors from making it big in the domestic market.

Goyal said he was guarded in the beginning as he had recently received a visitor – a plant from one of the Chinese equipment makers – who claimed to be doing research on a telecom paper and wanted a copy of the report Goyal had been working on to point out security concerns over the Chinese telecom gear.

Local equipment manufacturers have been opposing the entry of foreign players for several years but their pitch has grown louder recently. Why? Despite the efforts of various government departments – DPIIT (Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade) and TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) – to promote local manufacturing, the buyers still mostly prefer imported products. Then, there is the recent chatter around the rise in security risk with the emergence of 5G, which is used for more vulnerable machine-to-machine (or IoT) communications. The US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Taiwan have already banned Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE, over security concerns.