@ CES: ZTE Corp. makes bold predictions for 2011

LAS VEGAS — ZTE Corp. had a banner year in 2010 and it wants to build on that momentum even further in 2011.
The company experience a 30% growth rate in handset sales from 2009 to 2010 and a nearly 50% jump in terminal products during the same period. Now the Chinese company is projected to sell 120 million terminal units in 2011 and it wants to become one of the three top handset vendors worldwide by 2016. On the smart phone front, ZTE shipped 1 million devices in 2010 and wants to move more than 10 million smart phones by the end of this year.
“We’re putting our efforts in multiple parallels for different carrier needs,” June Wang, VP of wireless terminals in the United States, told RCR Wireless News at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Not only that, but the company will also have to be running on all cylinders if it plans to match its goals. At its booth, ZTE was showing off its new suite of ZTE Light tablets including ZTE Light, ZTE Light 2 and ZTE Light LTE.
Wang said ZTE is positioning its tablets for the mass market rather than “privileged consumers” and the company hopes that will enable it to become the third largest tablet manufacturer in the world by the end of this year.
As was the case with most tablets on display at CES, ZTE’s latest offerings are running on Google Inc.’s Android operating system. ZTE appears to be coalescing around that OS more and more for its smart phones and tablets going forward.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to do our own operating system,” Wang said. “We only want to support the most popular ones.”