"With today's announcement the number of circles in which Nokia is managing network for Hutch would go up to 19," Ashish Chowdhary, country head for networks division of Nokia in India said.
He, however, did not disclose the size of the deal in dollar terms citing confidentiality agreement with Hutch. Nokia had signed a similar deal with Hutch in January for nine of its existing circles.
India to be Nokia's global hub
It will now run Hutch's network in 19 of its 23 circles. The deal for 10 circles announced on Monday includes three existing circles of Maharashra, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and seven Greenfield circles in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Assam and Northeast.
In the Greenfield circles, Nokia will build and run from scratch the infrastructure for Hutch. Of the 19 circles, nine have already been taken over by Nokia while three, which came to Hutch with acquisition of BPL Mobile Cellular, are in transition.
The roll out in the greenfield circles would start around third quarter when Hutch gets spectrum, Chowdhary said. As part of the deal, Nokia will also take on another 200 employees of Hutch taking the total to 800, the number of employees it has absorbed, he added.
Nokia would run Hutch's network from solutions centre in Chennai. Nokia has a similar agreement with the country's top GSM mobile phone service provider Bharti Airtel and has won contracts worth $400 million from it for eight circles.
The contracts have the capacity to cover more than 4500 villages and towns. Nokia has also taken on 200 employees of Bharti.
Till date Nokia has 39 managed services contracts in 30 countries and it expects this figure to grow in coming years.
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