Asian Telecomms sector in Millenium for subcontractors

"Sir, We want to inform you that two of our drive testing engineers and post-processing engineers  have continuously worked for 28 hours for 3 times last week. Due to their efforts, we have now completed 97 sites and we are meeting our site completion targets."

These days, we read such emails in our company emails and if we think, then we may question if that number of working hours were actually required, were these done to eradicate a crisis or is a normal practice. In this article, we shall look at this problem and how it is affecting quality, manpower development and Asian telecommunications job market.

Twenty First Century Mobile Communications:

Mobile communications infrastructure market players have been European and American vendors till we hit Millenium. From early 2000s, a new age of Telecommunications infrastructure vendors from Asia Pacific started which has taken telecom world by storm. These vendors had big plans to get the market share.

Part of the strategies to get market share was to undercut European and American infrastructure vendor prices by going much below the prices of European and American vendors. The market share strategy was successful and European and American vendors started losing their ground.

Network by network, prices of Asia Pacific vendors were too low to reject partially due to alleged loans from their country's banks and links with political party. Part of network rollout sites, equipment, software or services were free to compel sale and many times, they succeeded.

But this was not only the strength of these AP vendors. Their motto was not to say "No" to customer, immediately acting on customer requests and bringing resources based on customer requests were exemplary. Apart from this, international trips and trainings for customers also helped the close of sale.


Also, the hard working nature of these AP vendors and reaching unexplored and dangerous markets like Iraq helped them get the larger market share quickly.

Implementation of Market Share Strategies:

For any vendor (here mentioned as contractor), implementation of its strategies happens through the sub-contractors who perform work for them. These sub-contractors are also called partners when the relationship reaches sufficiently trustworthy stage.

When a vendor provides very low prices to telecom services operator, it has to reduce its losses or increase its profit by some means. One of the key techniques is to do it through reduction in the prices of materials and services from sub-contractors. In this way, losses are reduced and there is sufficient profit margin in the project if there is such a case.

Many of these sub-contractors are dependent upon a vendor and so have to accept the prices given.  

Continued..............