CEO Simon Beresford-Wylie confident on future opportunities after U.S. telco selects rivals for mobile network.
The chief executive of Nokia Siemens Networks said Wednesday he's unfazed by his company's exclusion from building the main part of Verizon Wireless' next-generation mobile network.
"This is their first wave of buildout - we're right at the beginning of this," Simon Beresford-Wylie told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.
"I look forward to being there in the second wave" he added, noting that telecom equipment is "a long-term business."
Nokia Siemens, a telecom equipment joint venture between Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG, will still play a part in Verizon's plans for its Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, network, which the U.S. carrier - a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC - unveiled Wednesday.Nokia Siemens is one of two main suppliers of the IP multimedia subsystem, or IMS, which helps deliver multimedia features through the network.
That deal will "provide a great platform to build a deep relationship with Verizon," Beresford-Wylie said.
Beresford-Wylie also noted that Nokia Siemens is working with local partners to supply Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc. with LTE equipment.
"We're not with Verizon, we are with DoCoMo ... In our business, that's just the way these things play out sometimes," he said.
He also said other opportunities in LTE will arise for the company."LTE, for the very large part, comes as an upgrade" to base stations Nokia Siemens is already providing, he said.
The company expects to ship 80,000 to 100,000 such base stations in 2009, he added.
