From the way the vendors talked in last year’s earnings calls, you’d get the impression that 2009 was one of the most horrible years for the telecom infrastructure market. But ABI Research said it wasn’t as bad as the industry made it out to be. Rather than decline as much 10% to 12% as many analysts estimated, the equipment market saw a surge in the second half of the year, said Aditya Kaul, practice director for ABI.
“There was a contraction in the wireless infrastructure market to be sure,” Kaul said in a statement. “But our analysis shows overall CAPEX down only about 5% compared to 2008. Even net base station spending was down only 5%.”
China was one of the key drivers in the market with 243,000 new wireless base stations added in 2009.In Africa, Huawei helped carriers look past the bad global economy by providing vendor financing. And in North America, investments in 4G technology such as Verizon Wireless’ (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) initial long-term evolution deployments and Clearwire’s (NASDAQ:CLWR) large-scale rollout of WiMax.