Ericsson reported a remarkable 54% market growth in North America in Q4 2024
Ericsson’s final quarter in 2024 showed rising sales for the first time in eight quarters, a feat it owes almost entirely to North America, and perhaps AT&T, more specifically. At the end of 2023, the vendor signed a $14 billion contract with the U.S. carrier.
Beyond this deal, though, Ericsson’s President and CEO Börje Ekholm noted a 70% increase in Network sales to North American telcos, driven by a wider “strong year-end hardware demand and significant software traction.” Cloud Software and Services sales also increased by 11% in North America for the quarter.
Despite its 2% increase in Q4 sales year-over-year (and a remarkable 54% market growth in North America) — bringing its total revenue for the quarter to $6.7 billion — the Swedish vendor reported a full-year sales decline of -5%, impacted by a 6% sales decrease in networks. Sales in Europe and Latin America saw a slight improvement of about 1%, but in general, sales outside of North America fell 11.5%.
Last year also saw 9,400 Ericsson employees lose their jobs to cuts as the company sought to protect its margins. It seemed to work — its Q4 margin for earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization (EBITA) ended up coming in at 10.9%, compared with 8.1% a year earlier and net income was up 43% year-over-year. However, this improvement wasn’t enough to prevent its shares from dropping roughly 9%.
Another key takeaway are Ekholm’s claims around API momentum, which would finally mean the vendor has something to show for its acquisition of cloud communications company Vonage. In September last year, Ericsson launched a joint network APIs venture — now called Aduna — with several telcos from around the world. Aduna incorporates part of its Vonage business and will ideally bolster the open API vision of exposing 5G network capabilities to application developers as a means to new revenue for telcos.
“We see further signs that the overall RAN market is now stabilizing,” Ekholm commented. “We are not yet at our long-term EBITA goal, but we are progressing towards it, supported by our strategic actions.” He added that in the enterprise space, Ericsson’s priority remains stabilizing the commercial performance of its portfolio and driving growth across key areas like mission critical and enterprise private networks.
