UTStarcom to Pursue Emerging Smart Appliance Market in JV with Leading Appliance Maker

HONG KONG, March 08, 2018 -- UTStarcom (“UTStarcom” or “the Company”) (NASDAQ:UTSI), a global telecommunications infrastructure provider, announced today that it has signed an agreement to form a joint venture with a leading Zhejiang-based developer and manufacturer of refrigerators in China.  The JV will develop commercial “Smart shopping machines” for retail stores. 

UTStarcom’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Ti stated, “UT is in the process of leveraging our communications and IT infrastructure expertise to enter new and exciting growth markets.  Retail store automation is an especially fertile opportunity, and we are moving into it aggressively.  We are already field-testing a broad-based automation platform product with one of China’s largest e-Commerce companies.  This new JV will offer individual ‘smart appliances’ that further capitalize on our IT expertise while expanding the market opportunity.”

In addition to the development of smart refrigerators, the new JV will provide a comprehensive retail automation solution for the fast-growing Chinese smart retail store market.  The product line includes smart shopping machines with hardware and software support. Smart retail solutions are expected to enhance the customer experience and save operating costs.  The product utilizes integrated technologies such as facial recognition, image analysis, behavior identification, load sensor, RFID, and mobile payment.  Moreover, the cloud-based operations center will offer various types of value-added services, enabling the real-time interaction of people, products and localities.

About UTStarcom Holdings Corp.

UTStarcom is a global telecom infrastructure provider dedicated to developing technology that will serve the rapidly growing demand for bandwidth from cloud-based services, mobile, streaming, and other applications.  We work with carriers globally, from Asia to the Americas, to meet this demand through a range of innovative broadband packet optical transport and wireless/fixed-line access products and solutions.  The Company’s end-to-end broadband product portfolio, enhanced through in-house Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based orchestration, enables mobile and fixed-line network operators and enterprises worldwide to build highly efficient and resilient future-proof networks for a range of applications, including mobile backhaul, metro aggregation, broadband access and Wi-Fi data offload.  Our strategic investments in media operational support service providers expand UTStarcom’s capabilities in the field of next generation video platforms.  UTStarcom was founded in 1991, started trading on NASDAQ in 2000, and has operating entities in Hong Kong; Tokyo, Japan; San Jose, USA; Delhi and Bangalore, India; Hangzhou and China.  For more information about UTStarcom, please visit http://www.utstar.com.

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UTStarcom Holdings Corp.
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Ms. Ning Jiang, Investor Relations
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