ZTE Corp today claimed overtaking Alcatel-Lucent in global wireless equipment market for the year 2009. ZTE’s market share at the end of the year reached 12.6% in terms of carrier frequency with macro base station market share of ZTE reaching 9.1% in Q4 2009 reveals a new study from Infonetics Research.

In GSM space, the research says that ZTE managed shipments of over 750,000 carrier frequencies with the company’s share rising to about 20% thereby making it among the top 3 GSM equipment vendors across the globe.

The report also states that by 2014, LTE, GSM and WCDMA will have 22%, 30% and 42% share of the global RAN market. In terms of system, WCDMA RAN overtook GSM market for the first time with a market share of 41%. GSM’s share was at 36%, CDMA’s at 16% and TD had a 7% share.

The global RAN market overall reported a 9.2% drop in revenues to slide to $ 38.6 billion in 2009 from $ 42.5 billion in 2008.

Interestingly one third of the world’s 3G base stations were deployed in China alone which exclude RRH or Remote Radio Head based base stations. Infonetics forecasts that the global wireless market will register a single digit growth in 2009.