Siemens believes North American telecoms operators could shift to the GSM mobile standard from the rival CDMA system, a senior company executive said in an interview published on Thursday.
"Latin America is already moving from CDMA technologies to GSM," Christoph Catselitz, the head of Siemens AG"s mobile networks business told Finnish business daily Taloussanomat.
"I would not bet on North America continuing with CDMA."
CDMA (code division multiple access) technology was invented by San Diego-based Qualcomm and the company delivers virtually all chips needed in CDMA networks and mobile phones used by some 500 million consumers mostly in the Americas and Asia.
The rival European-invented Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) has 1.6 billion users globally, according to the GSM Association.
"CDMA is losing market share globally as the new mobile phone users live mostly in the areas where GSM is the leading technology," Catselitz was quoted as saying.