Marconi, the electronics manufacturer, has won a L2bn ($3bn) five-year contract to supply British Telecommunications with optical electronics equipment for its European broadband network.
Marconi said the order was a “breakthrough” that would probably create jobs at its Coventry optical systems plant in the English Midlands and at other plants and research facilities in the UK and Italy. The shares rose 49p to L10.25.
The company said the order could eventually be worth more than L2bn, which was “a figure in the mid-range” of its expectations. Part of the order was for the supply of current generation SDH, or synchronous digital hierarchy, equipment, the most common fibre optic technology.
However, Marconi would also be supplying the new generation of DWDM, or dense wavelength division multiplexing equipment, in which it has been striving to establish a presence. Marconi said DWDM would deliver “massively increased broadband capacity under the same management system as existing SDH networks.”
Analysts said Marconi, the former GEC, had been eager to show that it could win leading contracts for its in-house developed equipment and compete with the leading North American communications equipment suppliers.
Mark Davies Jones, of Salomon Smith Barney, said: “This is a huge coup, and a big contract in anyone’s language. They have been promising people they have a recipe for the next generation of communications, and now they have an opportunity to prove it.”
Nortel Networks of Canada, one of the world’s biggest telecoms equipment suppliers, was also chosen by BT as a supplier to the European network, but no financial details were given. The planned network, which BT unveiled in February last year, is intended to carry the bulk of BT’s services. Reuters