ZTE appoints new India CEO, promises more phones for the country

ZTE Corp., China's second-largest telecom equipment maker, is planning to launch more products in India to help increase smartphone revenues by 30 percent this year. The company announced this while naming a new Chief Executive for its operations in the country.

ZTE India named Xu Dejun as CEO to replace Cui Liangjun who will move to the company's headquarters in Shenzhen, China.

It also said that the 2012 sales figure for its India operations rose over the last two years to $700 million. The year-ago sales figure was not immediately available. “Our enterprise business is expanding at a phenomenal rate and we have focused partner initiatives in place to build more synergy. We are working on various projects for education, hospitality and smart cities,” said Xu.

The Grand S is one of ZTE's most exciting phones

ZTE, which is also the world's fourth-biggest handset maker, and rival Huawei Technologies Co Ltd have diversified from selling just telecom network gear, where growth has slowed, into consumer electronics gadgets such as smartphones and tablet PCs.

The company, which announced several phones at the recently-concluded Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, has minimal presence in India and much of their revenue in the country is from the enterprise services business. Currently, there are four ZTE Android smartphones available in India, but it is not easy to find a ZTE phone if one were to look.

Just like Huawei, ZTE has only forayed into the low-end smartphone market. However, the company has some exciting top-tier handsets in its portfolio, which we hope to see in India. ZTE launched the Grand Memo and the Grand S at the MWC, along side the first Firefox OS phone, the ZTE Open.

The Grand Memo should especially appeal to users in India, who seem to have embraced phablets more warmly than other parts of the world. It brings a huge 5.7-inch HD screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. It is powered by the top-end Snapdragon 800 or 600 CPUs and has an Adreno 330 GPU. The phablet is only 8.5 mm thick, but thanks to the extra height and width, the ZTE engineers managed to cram a 3200 mAh battery inside it.

The Grand S joins the fast-burgeoning 1080p brigade with the 5-inch LCD. Underneath, it has a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.7GHz and 2GB of RAM. The phone looks well-designed, but unfortunately, packs only a 1780 mAh battery, which sounds not large enough for a phone with these specs.

Both phones have a 13MP shooter with 1080p video capture. On the connectivity side, they have LTE Cat 3 (100Mbps down, 50Mbps up), Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi support

With inputs from Reuters