NEC to accelerate Brazil industry connectivity projects

Japanese integrator NEC is working to accelerate new private network projects in Brazil, with talks underway in the manufacturing, agribusiness and logistics sectors, the firm’s Brazil president, José Renato Gonçalves, told BNamericas.

The only ongoing initiative where NEC is involved as an integrator is the private network for Hospital das Clínicas in São Paulo, considered Latin America’s largest hospital complex.

The 5G project was announced in September last year. Based on the openRAN concept, it was conceived by consulting giant Deloitte.

NEC joined as the network’s integrator, Brazil’s industrial development agency ABDI came in as partner and co-financier, while the healthcare equipment was provided by Siemens.

Data transmitted by the two 5G Airspan antennas installed at the hospital are sent and processed at the datacenter of local bank Itaú Unibanco, another partner in the project, on servers from Cisco, Dell and HP.

“The project’s second phase consists of implementing the network in the city of Santarém in Pará [state], connecting it with the complex in São Paulo. We’re now looking at the issue of funding and how to make this viable. Then the idea is to expand to other cities in the country,” said Gonçalves in a recent interview at the Futurecom event in São Paulo.

Another focus for NEC is observability, that is, providing the entire visibility over a company's digital ecosystem, from front to back end, including networks, hybrid environments and local and cloud workloads.

“Another business front is smart cities. We have a lot in this regard in Argentina and Chile that we are bringing to Brazil, especially in the areas of urban mobility and traffic control, as well as public lighting, among others,” said the executive, adding that the company is also advancing in the public sector vertical.

Last year, NEC won a contract to supply a Cisco-branded firewall solution to São Paulo state’s finance and planning department. It includes hardware, software and licenses, as well as technical support, maintenance and technology updates.

THE RAN STRATEGY

NEC has positioned itself as an ambitious supplier of open network equipment in the openRAN model. Yet despite several pledges in the recent years, it has not really taken off in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.

“OpenRAN is part of a medium-term strategy for the NEC Corporation. Today our strategy is to develop our own openRAN software. And then, yes, on top of that, integrate radios from different manufacturers, servers, etc,” said Gonçalves. “In its first versions, this software should be ready by the middle of next year."

According to the Dell’Oro consultancy, NEC was among the top four openRAN suppliers by revenue in 1H23, trailing Samsung and ahead of Fujitsu and Rakuten Symphony.

“NEC experienced a material improvement in its openRAN market share between 2022 and 1H23, whereas Mavenir's openRAN revenue share declined over the same period,” Dell’Oro wrote in an August report.

Global revenues from both openRAN and virtualizedRAN declined in 2Q23, marking the first quarter of year-over-year contractions since Dell'Oro began tracking these next generation architectures back in 2019.

NEC posted 707bn yen (US$4.7bn) in global revenues for the quarter ended June 30, up 7.1% year-over-year.

Of the total, 386bn yen (+8.6%) corresponded to the IT services unit while 215bn (+8.9%) came from the social infrastructure segment, its two core lines of business. The company does not provide regional revenue figures. 

NEC has operated in Brazil, which is its largest Latin American market, for over 50 years.