The CEO at Etisalat Nigeria, Steven Evans, is reported to have resigned from the company last month, although no formal statement has been issued.

According to reports, Evans resigned and returned to the UK after leading the company for most of its five years in existence.

He has been replaced by the company’s chief commercial officer Matthew Willsher on an interim basis while a permanent CEO is found.

Qualcomm has reported a one-third rise in its fiscal Q4 revenues, and nearly the same for its operating profits as the company continues to benefit from surging smartphone sales.

Revenues rose by 33 per cent to US$6.48 billion, while operating profits rose by 29 per cent to US$1.59 billion.

R&D expenses increased 23 per cent primarily due to an increase in costs to develop CDMA-based 3G, OFDMA-based LTE and other technologies for integrated circuit and related software products and to expand the intellectual property portfolio.

MSM chip shipments were 190 million units, up 35 per cent year-on-year and 10 per cent sequentially.

Net profit was up by 18 per cent to US$1.5 billion.

The company ended September with $29.4 billion in cash and equivalents in the bank.

"Looking forward, we expect continued strong growth of 3G and 3G/4G multimode devices around the world, particularly in China with the anticipated launch of LTE." said Paul E. Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm.

For the full-year to end-September, Qualcomm recorded record revenues of US$24.87 billion, up 30 per cent year-on-year.

VimpelCom announced that its quarterly revenues declined slightly, and its profits halved as the company was hurt by regulatory cuts and a general market slowdown.

The company posted third-quarter revenues of US$5.7 billion, which were down by one per cent year-on-year.

The company said that its revenues were hurt by regulatory and governmental actions in the business unit in Africa & Asia and the mobile termination rate cuts in Italy. Excluding the reduction of mobile termination rates in Italy, group revenues would have remained stable organically year-on-year.

At the same time the customer base rose by five per cent to 219 million subscribers. The largest absolute contribution came from a substantial increase in subscribers in Asia and Africa.

However net profits were down by 53 per cent to US$255 million. The decrease is primarily the result of negative foreign exchange effects and higher finance costs due to the Eurobonds issued in Q113 for the repayment of maturing debt in 2013 and 2014.

"The third quarter results were impacted by regulatory and competitive pressures. Our underlying performance was stable and the operational improvements we are making in Russia are on track, with mobile service revenue growth of three per cent,” commented Jo Lunder, the company’s CEO.

Zain Kuwait plans to launch a commercial LTE-A network in the country, based on hardware supplied by Huawei.

The rollout will see Zain and Huawei activate over 100 LTE-A cell sites during a first phase, with Zain indicating that the technology will later be made available across the country as more sites become operational.

"The deployment of this milestone commercial LTE-A network will jump start the next phase of mobile communications in the Middle East, providing mobile broadband customers across Kuwait an opportunity to enjoy unparalleled communication services," said Omar Al Omar, CEO of Zain Kuwait.

Kuwait is experiencing high levels of market saturation in its telecom sector, with an estimated mobile penetration rate of nearly 215 per cent. Zain has a market share of around 39 per cent of mobile broadband customers in Kuwait with nearly 10 per cent of its mobile customers having already migrated to LTE.

Huawei has pledged to invest a minimum of US$600 million in research and innovation for 5G technologies by 2018. The investment will cover a range of key enabling technologies, including the research of air-interface technology.

Huawei predicts that the first 5G networks will be ready for commercial deployment starting in 2020 and will deliver peak data rates of over 10Gbps, 100 times faster than today’s 4G networks.

Eric Xu, rotating CEO of Huawei, said: "Innovation is a continuous journey. While we continue to evolve our existing 4G network capabilities, we plan to invest a minimum of US$600 million over the next five years on research and innovation for 5G mobile network technologies to ensure that we are meeting the consumers’ demands for increasingly faster and better connections. This number does not include investment to productise 5G technologies."

Huawei says that it began investing in 5G in 2009. At the Mobile World Congress in 2011 and 2012, the company demonstrated industry-leading 5G prototype base stations with the capacity up to 50 Gbps. To date, Huawei has participated in the EU’s 5G research projects, worked on the establishment of the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) in England, and participated in joint research programmes with over 20 universities around the world.

"There are several issues that must be resolved before 5G can become a reality," said Xu. "These include the availability of spectrum and technological challenges, such as how to engineer network architectures capable of handling increasingly higher data volumes and transmission speeds necessary to accommodate more users on the network."