Investment of RMB 180 billion in 2009
The Chinese government estimated that 3G network-related investments would reach RMB 400 billion within three years. The three major operators have already invested RMB 120 billion in infrastructure projects in the first quarter of 2009; more projects, worth RMB 60 billion, will be implemented throughout the next three quarters. Chinese equipment providers such as ZTE, Huawei, China Sky Technology System and Fiber Home, who have won most of the projects, have an advantage. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of opportunities for overseas providers who have unique technologies or product portfolios. 

Emerson Network Power, which provided power supply equipment and solutions to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the Tibet railway project, is looking for opportunities in the China 3G development. According to Stephen Liang, president of Emerson Network Power Asia Pacific, there are plenty of business opportunities because the three operators are in need of expanding their existing power facilities in data centers or increasing their mobile network coverage. In fact, infrastructure expansion has never halted, even before the 3G network deployment. Emerson accelerated the business development in the China market two years ago.

Ensure content delivery quality
Liang commented that the Chinese government started putting more emphasis on content delivery and transmission infrastructure development in the telecommunication industry. Thus, operators have realized the growing importance of network infrastructure and datacenter development.

Operators in China tend to build their own datacenters, which is different from the third party data-hosting approach advocated by Hong Kong operators. In recent years, Emerson has focused on promoting related datacenter and telecom products to operators. The 3G era provides a good market environment for this effort.

Distributed and smaller datacenters
Although there has been an improvement in energy efficiency of telecommunication equipment recently, Liang believed that companies still need Emerson’s solutions (to provide more power) since there is a high and continued growth of datacenters. Datacenters are growing in a distributed model. This means that there will be an increase in the number of small datacenters, and each of them will consume less energy. These datacenters have completely different requirements for energy-saving and cooling compared to large scale datacenters. High-density and high-efficiency will be the two key focuses. 

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