“India market holds a very important position in ZTE's overseas business. This year, we had challenges, but even that didn't impact the India business much. We quickly recovered and our business has come to normal,” ZTE India CEO Peng Aiguang told ET.

He, however, declined to provide specific figures. But a person familiar with the matter said ZTE, which clocked about ?1,200 crore revenue in 2017, expects that to remain flat or go up to ?1,300 crore in 2018. ZTE is currently providing equipment for BSNL’s 4G and 3G networks’ expansion in the North-East zone and Bharti Airtel’s network expansion in select circles. ZTE recently won a contract from Vodafone Idea to supply equipment in five circles.

The Chinese vendor that competes with the likes of Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, suffered some business losses because it was not able to supply some equipment to Indian clients due to the US ban, which has since been revoked.

Peng said despite the challenges in the US and the consolidation in a financially stressed India telecom market, ZTE hasn’t laid off any employee. “We are keeping investments in India. The most important investment is on employees. There were no job cuts and salary cuts. The company stood behind the people.”