Russia Fails To Replace Mobile Communications Equipment

The need to replace microcircuits causes most problems.

Russian manufacturers of telecommunications equipment have faced a shortage of domestic components and have asked the government to revise the import substitution deadlines. This follows from a letter from the ANO Consortium Telecommunication Technologies (ANO TT; unites Rostec, Rostelecom, Element, etc.) to the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Digital Development, a copy of which was reviewed by Vedomosti.

In particular, manufacturers have proposed that the departments soften the new requirements for recognizing equipment as domestic. According to the draft government resolution, which the Ministry of Industry and Trade prepared at the end of August, from 2026 Russian telecom equipment should have at least 10% of the domestic electronic component base (ECB), in 2028 — already 30%, and from 2030 — 60%.

However, telecom market participants, together with the All-Russian Research Institute of Radio Electronics (VNIIR), analyzed the domestic market for electronic components for the presence of foreign analogues and established the “unattainability of the proposed indicators for the percentage of Russian electronic components”, according to a letter from ANO TT.

Moreover, most of the nomenclature of telecom equipment will have to be redesigned to meet the new requirements with domestic electronic components, which is impractical. This may cause problems with the supply of equipment to government customers, the largest telecom operators, as well as critical information infrastructure (CII) entities, ANO TT claims.

The organization warned: if the government decree is adopted in its current form, then from December 1, 2024, all issued decisions on recognizing telecom equipment as domestic will be terminated. Thus, there will be no domestic communication equipment left in the country, industry representatives concluded.

“The deadlines set for Russian vendors can be called not just ambitious, but practically unattainable,” said Dmitry Lakontsev, CEO of the Russian TKO manufacturer Irtea. According to him, import substitution of key components, especially electronic components, is not a two-year task.

“We have been looking for domestic analogues for several years now, and still haven’t found real candidates. This applies to almost our entire product range,” says Lakontsev. According to him, if we insist on the implementation of components that are not yet ready, domestic telecom equipment will be released later and will cost significantly more, which is especially critical for 5G technologies.

Telecom equipment manufactured in Russia is strictly tied to imports — from the component base to the cases, notes Olga Kvashenkina, CEO of SNDGroup. At the same time, existing enterprises that already make the component base are overloaded with orders. “There is no sharp increase in the output of such products expected in the next 5-7 years,” says Kvashenkina.

The main problems are in the import substitution of memory chips (DRAM), FPGA/FPGA, powerful microwave transistors for the radio path of base stations, as well as some analog chips, notes independent analyst and author of the RUSmicro Telegram channel Alexey Boyko.

According to him, failure to meet the indicators for import substitution of telecom equipment may result in the deadlines being “shifted to the right”. However, the government will slow down the certification process for the relevant equipment and the construction of new communication networks, the expert concluded.

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