The Yadro company, which is part of ICS Holding, intends to arrange the development and production of LTE and 5G base stations in the Moscow region. The working site will be organized in Dubna near Moscow. Although earlier it was planned to create a joint venture with Nokia, the latter’s departure from the Russian market forced the domestic vendor to rely on its own resources.
As reported “businessman”, in May Yadro established a separate legal entity, engaged in hiring engineering personnel (including those from Intel and Nokia development centers that closed in Russia) and expects to invest about 5-7 billion rubles in the project. It was established that the Yadro group registered the Yadro Center for Mobile Communication Technologies LLC on May 4, and Artyom Ikoev, head of Yadro Microprocessors LLC, also became the director of the company. The main activity of the new company is research and development in the field of natural and technical sciences.
At the same time, according to many industry experts, the Core will have to accept not only employees who previously worked for Western companies, but also look for design documentation, since the existing Russian developments do not yet meet the requirements of mobile operators.
According to Kommersant, the vendor intends to develop and manufacture LTE and 5G base stations. The company announced the construction of the complex in Dubna last autumn. It was planned to produce up to 1 million pieces of equipment annually. According to some reports, in the case of organizing the production of LTE stations, the vendor will have to compete with another domestic manufacturer – the Spektr company, which is part of Rostec, which has been working on the same project since last year. At the same time, other divisions of ICS Holding participate in the Spektra project.
The Ministry of Digital Development believes that the transition to domestic LTE stations can be implemented by local forces, and last year the ministry extended frequency permits for mobile operators, provided that they switch to Russian equipment. However, at that time the calculations were carried out under different conditions – it was believed that this would contribute to the localization of production by Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei in Russia. However, according to the head of the NTI competence center based on Skoltech Dmitry Lakontsev, even the refusal to cooperate on the part of the largest vendors will not prevent Russia from creating its own solutions, in the country “At least three hardware and software solutions for LTE networks are already being developed, one of them is in Skoltech”although they do not yet meet the requirements of the operators.
According to some experts, former engineers of foreign companies, now working at Yadro, will need modern design documentation and an element base for the production of equipment, so it will not be easy to implement the project under the current conditions.