Infonetics said this week that Huawei has earned the top spot in its 2012 Telecommunications Equipment Vendor Leadership Scorecard. Ericsson was a very close second, followed by Cisco. Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Solutions and Networks and ZTE round out the top six telecom vendors. Infonetics says that the six leading vendors together earn more than half the world’s telecom equipment and services revenue.
The report ranks vendors based on market share, market share momentum, financial stability and the breadth of their telecom infrastructure, software and services offerings. Huawei earned the first place rank, after winning first place last week in Informa’s ranking of top LTE vendors, which is based on the number of LTE contracts each vendor has been awarded to date. The Infonetics rankings are of course much broader in scope.
When ranked solely on the basis of telecom revenue, Ericsson takes first place, with an estimated $28.6 billion in 2012. Huawei follows with $22.7 billion, and NSN has third place with $18.2 billion.
Infonetics’ lead analyst Michael Howard said that Ericsson earned high marks last year for growing its RAN business despite challenging market conditions. “The big RAN area, which includes LTE, but also 2G and 3G is a fairly flat market when you put it all together,” he said. “LTE is growing fast but the others are not.” Recent data from Dell’Oro Group shows that LTE growth is so strong now that it is starting to push the market higher, despite declines in 2G and 3G.
Howard notes that despite Cisco’s recently announced job cuts, he sees a strong future for the networking giant in telecom. “Cisco, in the last couple years they lost some share but so did everybody, but they’re gained some back in the last couple of years. They improved their momentum score between last year and this year.” Howard notes that Cisco is holding its own in the highly competitive router market. “It’s a fight for every contract, and so it’s tough to make big changes and making some changes and staying even with the market is actually a huge accomplishment.”
“Never count Cisco out,” said Howard. “Whenever there has been some kind of difficulty they have been able to turn it around, and actually do it quickly for a big player. … I think Cisco did the right thing as far as telecom goes, in combining their router and optical group, because in a few years the equipment is going to be a lot more integrated than it is today.”
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