AT&T Co has won a manufacturing agreement with the Chinese State Planning Commission that it says is potentially worth billions of dollars over the next decade: the memorandum of understanding covers a wide range of business areas, starting with joint-venture production of telephone exchanges – China is expected to install between 6m and 10m telephone lines each year over the next several decades: AT&T was effectively barred from manufacturing switching systems in China under a secret directive from the State Council in 1989 that awarded the market exclusively to Siemens AG, Alcatel NV and NEC Corp, each of which established joint ventures while AT&T had turned down a Chinese invitation to set up a switch plant because it was unhappy with technical requirements – but last October, US trade negotiators made withdrawal of the directive a key issue in Sino-US trade discussions; other areas of business may include manufacturing microelectronics, optical transmissions products and cellular equipment, network management, research involving AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, and training.
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