LAS VEGAS – For a company with the size and scope of Ericsson, to hear its CEO talk about the need to continue focusing on growth can be a bit unsettling. How much is enough? However, if there is one thing Ericsson Hans Vestberg is good at, besides running Ericsson, it’s making his quest for greater success does not come off as maniacal.
Vestberg, who is entering his fifth year as head of Ericsson, noted the company was just halfway through a 10-year program to re-shape its position in the telecommunications space. That re-shaping has seen the company invest heavily in managed services; operating support systems and business support systems; and billing.
“Ericsson is an 138-year-old company, but we need to continue to evolve the business to see that we are around for another 138 years,” Vestberg said during an interview at this week’s CES event in Las Vegas.
Vestberg noted that Ericsson has found success in the wireless space by narrowing its focus. That has seen the company double its size in relation to its nearest rival. Ericsson’s dominance in the wireless infrastructure space has become so pronounced that it’s more news if the company does not win a carrier contract than if it does.
“We win some and we lose some,” Vestberg noted in response to a question regarding Ericsson not being named as an equipment supplier to recent deals in South Korea.
As for driving future innovation and growth opportunities for Ericsson, Vestberg acknowledged that the United States, Korea and Japan have led the “4G” revolution, with carriers in those countries aggressively moving to deploy next-generation services. This has seen operators in those markets quickly move to expand LTE-based coverage nearly nationwide, while many other markets are just now rolling out the technology.
Vestberg did note that the aggressive nature of those rollouts were pushed by the need of many operators to move away from CDMA-based 3G technologies to LTE if they wanted to remain competitive against rivals that were looking to update their GSM/UMTS-based networks to HSPA+.
As for the potential of continued consolidation across the U.S. market, Vestberg noted that such moves have been happening across the mobile space since its inception and are inevitable.
“We have been living with consolidation all the time,” Vestberg explained, adding that there is typically three phases of consolidation that impact Ericsson’s business. Initially, network investments are reduced following such deals, followed by an opening up of opportunities in the mid-term and finally the need for accelerated spending in the long term as the larger carrier looks to add more capacity to serve a larger customer base.
Bored? Why not follow me on Twitter?
