Sign for Trip U.S. telecom suppliers courting China By George Leopold, EE Times Washington - China's telecommunications market is booming, and now U.S. suppliers are about to make a sales call there in an attempt to drum up new business. So far a dozen of them have signed up for an October trade mission cosponsored by the Commerce Department and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA; Arlington, Va.). The mission will travel to the China American Telecommunications Summit, which will take place in Dalian from Oct. 8 to 10. Already signed up are: AMP Inc.; Brady USA Inc.; Brooktrout Technology Inc.; Ciena Corp.; GTE Corp.; Iridium, the satellite communications consortium; Lucent Technologies; Motorola Inc.; New Global Telecom; Nortel; PanAmSat Corp.; and Panamax. Meanwhile, one participant, Lucent, said last week that it has won a contract to provide a fiber-optic and copper cable communications network for China's national games, scheduled to take place in Shanghai in October. Summit organizers said the trip is designed to give U.S. telecommunications firms an opportunity to pitch their wares to senior Chinese communications officials from Beijing and 10 provinces. William Daley, the U.S. secretary of commerce, and Wu Jichuan, China's minister of posts and telecom, are scheduled to attend the meeting. The trade mission "will give U.S. businesses access to a potentially lucrative market in a country primed for explosive telecommunications growth," said Larry Irving, head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications & Information Administration. Nevertheless, trade with China remains a touchy issue here in the aftermath of allegations about Chinese contributions to the Clinton reelection campaign and the alleged role of a former Commerce official in soliciting them. In any event, the TIA estimates that China will spend $110 billion on its telecommunications infrastructure over the next five years. The trade group hopes to sign up a total of 20 companies for the October trip. (Next article.) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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