Chinese majors ZTE and Huawei along with Alcatel Lucent have bagged orders from Shyam Telelink for supply of equipment for construction of nation wide mobile telephony network based on CDMA services. Shyam Telelink is a joint-venture of Russia-based JSFC "Sistema" and Shyam Group.

Though the size of order was not disclosed by the company, it should be in the order of billions of dollars. Sources said ZTE has got the largest chunk of order – more than 50% of the total quantity. Rest has been given to Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent.

 Shyam Telelink becomes the first company to select vendor and place orders for equipment. Each vendor will be allocated a certain geographical region in India for the deployment of equipment.

"The Company considered a number of factors, such as experience in implementation of large-scale projects, technical expertise, local resources and cost parameters, in the evaluation of the tender participants. The contract includes equipment delivery (including base stations, main radio- and switching subsystems and other auxiliary equipment) and provision of services related to network design, installation, start-up and commissioning," said Shyam Telelink in a statement.

Mr. Raymond Armes, President of Shyam Telelink, commented: "We have chosen ZTE, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei Technologies as our vendors based on the competitive advantages of their equipment and their capabilities to implement complex nation-wide projects."

Shyam Telelink now has spectrum in 19 telecommunications circles, covering 27 Indian states with a population of 1,066.5 million people (which comprise around 94.5% of Indian population).

Shyam Telelink Limited (STL) has been awarded Pan India license in March, 2008. STL is the first company to have been awarded spectrum for 19 circles amongst the new telecom licensees. STL founded in 1998, commercialized its Rajasthan operation in the year 2000. STL presently has 280,000 fixed subscribers in Rajasthan, and is expanding its network to offer mobile services. STL is a joint venture between Sistema JSFC and Shyam group of India, where in Sistema holds 73.71% equity.

Sistema is the largest public diversified corporation in Russia and the CIS, which manages fast growing companies operating in the consumer services sector and has over 100 million customers. Sistema develops and manages market-leading businesses in selected service-based industries, including telecommunications, technology, banking, real estate, retail, media, tourism and healthcare.

Founded in 1993, the company reported unaudited revenues of US$ 3.8 billion for the first quarter of 2008, and total assets of US$ 30.3 billion as at March 31, 2008. Sistema''s shares are listed under the symbol "SSA" on the London Stock Exchange, under the symbol "AFKS" on the Russian Trading System (RTS), under the symbol "AFKC" on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX), and under the symbol "SIST" on the Moscow Stock Exchange (MSE).