Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (“ZTE”) (H share stock code:0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ), a publicly-listed global provider of telecommunications equipment, network solutions and mobile devices, is pleased to offer the company’s perspectives on the key trends that will shape telecommunications and enterprise technology in 2014, as rapid growth of pervasive mobile networked services present new opportunities and challenges for operators and businesses globally.

In the “ICT Development Trends 2014: Embracing the Era of Mobile-ICT” report, ZTE’s inaugural annual industry outlook, the company presented 10 key trends that will usher in an exciting new era of mobile-empowered growth. ZTE believes that increasingly accessible mobile services will fundamentally transform how consumers communicate, shop and manage their finances, while enabling enterprises to provision applications and services with greater productivity and efficiency. In short, ZTE believes mobility will evolve from being a tool for simply delivering voice and data service, into a catalyst that changes how people live and work.

In the “Mobile-ICT” era, ZTE posits that service ubiquity and user experience will be the two main motifs as operators and enterprises leverage mobile technology to deliver innovations in finance, transportation, energy, education and health care.

10 key trends:-

. Seamless mobile access

Smartphones and smart pads are no longer alone in this revolution. The “last-mile” access technology, represented by WLAN, will gradually become the mainstream wireless technology, providing access points that replace wireline broadband access. In offices and in homes, on highways and railways, at airports and on airplanes, wireless access technology that seamlessly integrates 3G/4G/WLAN will become prevalent in the next few years, providing flexible, reliable and seamless wireless network access to users, by means of ever higher bandwidths.

. Smarter, more flexible and wearable Mobile Devices

Smartphone CPUs have grown from dual core to quad core and even octa core. The processing power of smart terminals is rapidly increasing, and wearable devices such as smart glasses and smart watches have appeared on the market, demonstrating a potential that is still hard to assess, but leaves plenty of room for the imagination. The industry has progressed in a number of important ways with flexible screens, flexible battery and other technologies, which create more opportunities for smart terminals. The quick take-up of HTML5 is expected to break the “walled garden” of APP stores, and web-based applications and local applications will co-exist for a long period of time.

. Anytime, anywhere

In the era of Mobile-ICT, services will be available ubiquitously thanks to the seamless access environment, increasingly strong and flexible smart terminals, and cloud computing technology. Mobile office, information sharing, socialization, electronic business, Internet finance and other services will be accessible to users at anytime and anywhere, further facilitating our life and improving our lifestyle with better experiences.

. Rapid growth of enterprise mobile applications

Broadband wireless access and the rapid development of smart terminals provide convenient usage scenarios beyond the mobile office. Supported by a rapidly progressing security technology and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology, enterprises will follow the trend of Mobile-ICT when deploying both critical external services and core internal applications. Mobility will cover every aspect of enterprise management and operation. This will significantly enhance enterprise operations and production efficiency, and provide rich new possibilities for ICT enterprises to profit from the mobile Internet.

. Scalable bandwidth

The flood of digital services requires that every layer of the network infrastructure speeds up its own evolution; from the access layer to the core layer, and from the wired network to the wireless network. At the core, it is the demand for higher bandwidth that drives the evolution of backbone networks towards 100G bearer networks and beyond. The transmission rate of wired access networks, however, will remain one order higher than the rate of wireless transmission. This imbalance in development will face a bottleneck sooner or later. Only innovation can break the bottleneck to allow the bandwidth to match Moore's Law and the capabilities of information processing. Such technology will provide a connection for the smooth exchange of exponentially expanding data and reduces the disparity between human desires and natural resources.

. Intelligent cloud-based networks

Smart mobile terminals and cloud applications will fuel the explosive growth of data traffic, greatly increasing operating costs for operators that can’t be adequately covered by new revenue streams. Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have already achieved a certain level of popularity. Network convergence, software definition, cloud computing, virtualization and smart terminals will become the dominating forces that lead the next round of network technology revolution. Cloud radio, cloud EPC, optical and package network, SDN packet switch, cloud storage, virtual desktop, smart terminals and cloud applications will become “recipes” for operators and enterprise clients to significantly reduce network equipment and operation costs.

. New traffic-based business models

ZTE’s own strategic research shows that mobile video traffic will occupy over 70% of total mobile data traffic by 2020. According to our predictions, mobile multimedia services will develop quickly in the next few years while video quality will definitely evolve from standard definition, to high definition, and then to ultra-high definition. Mobile video will ignite the explosion of mobile data traffic, and create entirely new traffic-based business models. With the explosion of mobile data, the core value of innovative business models for operators is to provide better traffic volume based services for individuals and enterprises, and transform the vast traffic flow into commercial value.

. Symbiotic digital ecosystem

The digital era builds a connected world where people and things are closely connected with each other. Any individual, enterprise or machine is possibly a consumer or a provider of information services, forming a brand new relational digital ecosystem. The system provides a “market” in which individuals and enterprises can exchange their information. The owner of the “market” place provides network infrastructure, operation services, channels and brands, and even a benefit sharing business mode. This thoroughly changes the situation in which enterprises develop only the capabilities and functions they demand, and will undoubtedly improve the organizational structure, service flows and operation and support systems of operators.

. Blurring of the physical and digital worlds

The physical world and the digital world will more closely interact with each other through information exchange. The business office, leisure, shopping, health care, education, entertainment, traffic and socialization will all inundate the mobile internet industry with its own value. A “physical atlas” will be built on the Internet, moving the physical world into the Internet and integrating the digital world and the physical world into one. All phy