American firms win lucrative contracts

China Unicom awarded contracts worth more than US$1bn to Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Motorola on the eve of President Jiang Zemin's visit to the US in late October. The contracts involve the upgrading of China's CDMA technology, which began operating in January this year. High-speed data services will be added and capacity will be increased by 5m subscribers. The deals were a welcome boost to the North American telecoms equipment suppliers, which have fared badly in recent months.