MTN Picks Harris

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS - News), a leading global supplier of wireless equipment and services, has secured a five-year supplier agreement with Africa's largest mobile phone operator, MTN Group. Harris will supply digital microwave radios for backhaul and access applications across MTN's networks in Africa.

The agreement follows Harris' success in working with MTN throughout Africa, including Cote d'Ivoire, Zambia and Nigeria, where Harris helped to design and construct Africa's largest backbone network, the Y'hello Bahn. Throughout these projects, Harris has demonstrated its commitment to the African market, offering complete design, installation, service and support through local offices.

The relationship between Harris and MTN began in 2003 in MTN Nigeria. To date, the MTN Nigeria network has grown to service more than nine million subscribers. Since Harris and MTN began working together, Harris has received orders from MTN totalling over US$84 million.

"The agreement with Harris is in line with MTN's procurement objectives, which includes the establishment of strategic partnerships with key suppliers in order to set the platform for value creation within the supply chain, thus contributing to MTN becoming a least-cost operator," said Dino Colbert, GM, MTN Group Procurement.

"Harris has established itself as a reliable supplier of SDH and PDH microwave transmission in some of the most demanding environments in Africa. The MTN-Harris relationship has expanded since 2003 and on this basis, MTN decided to cement this relationship with a group frame agreement," said Karel Pienaar, MTN Group CTIO.

The industry-leading TRuepoint(TM) digital microwave radios from Harris are ideally suited to the African market because of their robustness and rapid deployment capabilities. TRuepoint(TM) is also one of the most flexible microwave platforms on the market, scaling from 4 to 155 Mbps and supporting traditional TDM and Ethernet traffic to enable legacy and next-generation applications to run in parallel.

"Africa has been a focus market for Harris for some time, and this is a great endorsement of the company's strategy, technology and people in the region," said Joseph Joseph, regional managing director for the Middle East and Africa for the Harris Microwave Communications Division.

Harris Corp. (NYSE: HRS)

MTN Group Ltd.