Perhaps the most aggressive telco equipment provider in India today, Lucent Technologies was very impressive during 1999-00. Having already clinched a major deal during the previous year, Tata Lucent’s main focus was to win the remaining big telco rollout orders. Of the existing basic service providers in India, six are its customers. Only two—Bharti Telenet and Reliance Telecom—remained out of its grasp, the latter not having started its rollout yet.

The other big focus area was that of structured cabling. Lucent Technologies continued to be the dominant player in this space. In spite of increased number of competitors, it was able to hold on to its market share of around 35 percent. Another area of dominance was that of EPABX. Here it did its entire business through its JV company, Tata Telecom, which retained the biggest chunk of the PBX pie. Its strategy for the cellular market was also successful. It bagged MTNL’s cellular project, worth approximately Rs 12 crore. The other big win was from Escotel, which is going in for a GPRS network.

However, Lucent lacked in its strategy for the ISPs. The Ascend line of RAS products was not seen in the Indian market much. Lucent has taken unusually long to integrate Ascend products in its overall marketing strategy.

However, fiscal 1999-00 was generally a prolific year for Lucent Technologies. It did a total business of Rs 452.5 crore during the year. It is the only pure telco equipment vendor to show up in the Top 10 Club of V&D 100. Lucent as a company saw big changes as well. There was intense restructuring, both due to changes in Lucent worldwide as well as the ongoing process of Tata’s exit from the erstwhile JV. It was finally towards the end of the year, under Lucent’s new head in India, Vijay K Gupta, that it showed a semblance of order in its ranks. Little wonder that its ISP strategy, which required more intense marketing than its carrier business, failed.

Currently, Lucent’s operations are grouped under four categories. Its Systems Group, the largest, looks after the sales of its telco and ISP equipment. The Software Group handles the NMS and billing products, which Lucent sells through its own systems team as well as through distributors. Then there is the Services Group, which has not yet matured in India. Last, there is the Semiconductor Group, which basically represents Lucent’s sales to OEMs. Apart from the systems and software groups, Lucent’s operations in India also consist of an R&D lab in Bangalore working in the field of GSM wireless.

The big decision taken during last fiscal was that of spinning off its structured cabling and PBX businesses into a new company, which will focus on providing premises networking solutions to corporates. If this new Lucent outfit gets quickly formed, it will emerge out to be a very dominant force in the private communication segment. However, its impact on Lucent India’s status is unclear.

Though there is talk of competition from Cisco for the large telco segment, it will take some more time for IP equipment to get accepted as the core transmission equipment among the Indian telcos. Here, in addition to Lucent, the fight will still be between the traditional telco equipment providers like Siemens and Motorola.