ZTE, the mainland's second-largest telecommunications equipment maker, said it expected this year's sales to rise by about 20 per cent, driven by the growth in its mobile devices business.
The aim was to increase the contribution of terminals - including tablets, smartphones and personal computers - to half of its total revenue in three years, the Shenzhen-based company said.
Last year, sales of equipment accounted for more than 60 per cent of its total revenue, but these sales were expected to slow. The revenue generated by mobile devices made up 25 per cent of ZTE's total revenue in 2010, and the company plans to increase that to 30 per cent this year.
Huawei, China's biggest telecoms equipment manufacturer, which is also based in Shenzhen, said last month that it expected revenue to grow by about 10 per cent to US$31 billion this year, while sales of smartphones were to increase tenfold by 2012.
With ZTE's pace of growth at 20 per cent this year, executive vice-president Xie Daxiong said the sales gap with Huawei should narrow. Last year, ZTE's revenue, at US$10.6 billion, was about a third of Huawei's.
ZTE announced it would expand into the cloud-computing business last year and was expecting more than US$2 billion in revenue this year from enterprise cloud-computing products. Cloud computing offers services through a network of computers rather than a single device.
