How has NEC evolved since its arrival on the Iberian Peninsula 31 years ago?

NEC was a major 3G technology provider for some time on account of its partnership with Siemens, though it subsequently closed that partnership and its cellphone business. This marked the beginning of a new chapter in the company’s services business in Spain, especially in terms of cloud services. Currently, NEC’s businesses in Spain and Portugal are focused on 5G telecommunications infrastructures, specifically 5G Open RAN technology, displays and overhead projectors, biometrics products for onboarding purposes, with a range of fingerprint and facial recognition products, and a range of cloud services. Last, we recently opened a particularly important line of our cloud services business related to smart cities, which acts as the operating center for the city in question. We are implementing this technology in several cities across Spain and Portugal.

In terms of the 5G market in Spain and Portugal, who do you consider your main competitors?

Instead of participating in the mainstream 5G sector, we work in Open RAN technology, a new 5G paradigm. This is an open radio architecture and is therefore focused on moving issues of intelligence, virtualization, and automation over to software and data centers. In this regard, NEC has ample experience, since it pioneered the deployment of 5G Open RAN technology in Japan. NEC is now actively involved in leading the implementation of 5G Open RAN worldwide, specifically in Europe. We also opened a 5G Open RAN UK Center of Excellence, which has links with Spain and the rest of Europe. In addition, we are working on several pilot projects with European operators across Europe, such as Telefónica.