ZTE, a Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment and systems company and the world's fourth biggest handset manufacturer, is expecting a good new year.
With two months left to go in 2012, the company is already looking ahead to 2013, expecting to ship approximately 50 million smartphones in the year to come – up from the 35 million units it’s expected to sell this year.
Putting it simply, ZTE executive director He Shiyou said in an interview that he expects 2013 to be a good year for smartphones.
Last week, the company posted its third quarter financial results for the year, reporting its first quarterly loss since first listing in Hong Kong back in 2004, which amounted to $310 million. However, ZTE stills sits among the top four smartphone manufacturers with 7.5 percent market share – behind Samsung, Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) – so it isn't doing too badly.
And if the next year is going to be as good of a year as ZTE is predicting, it should start posting profits again soon.
The company recently started focusing more on producing high end, quality smartphones, shifting from its previous focus more on cheaply produced handsets for the low end. The result has been the Grand series of smartphones which boasts hardware comparable to handsets being produced by other Android phone manufacturers like Samsung and HTC.
Furthermore, in addition to Android sales next year, ZTE will be among the first manufacturers to launch handsets using Mozilla's mobile operating system, Firefox OS, which is heavily Web-based with everything coded in HTML5, down to the dialer app.
Also this month, ZTE, along with its partner Wexnet, won Best Broadband Partnership at the Broadband InfoVision awards held at the Broadband World Forum 2012 (BBWF) in Amsterdam. The two companies have been working closely since August 2011 to build a network that allows end users to select their own service providers for Internet access, IP telephony and IPTV services using the ICP Store service.
Edited by
Braden Becker 
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