“What we see is the 5G penetration is rapidly gaining momentum,” says Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm. “Just over the last two years, it’s been accelerated by more than a year. We see a very drastic acceleration of the demand for 5G. So far it’s primarily driven by North America where all the operators have the worst 5G as well as Korea where you see also all the operators. Those two markets are really driving the 5G demand right now.”

Borje Ekholm, CEO of Ericsson, discusses the dramatic acceleration in the growth of 5G and how that is positively impacting their business in an interview on Bloomberg:

5G Penetration Is Rapidly Gaining Momentum

What we see is the 5G penetration is rapidly gaining momentum. Just over the last two years, it’s been accelerated by more than a year. We see a very drastic acceleration of the demand for 5G. So far it’s primarily driven by North America where all the operators have the worst 5G as well as Korea where you see also all the operators. Those two markets are really driving the 5G demand right now.

We have upgraded our guidance today for a couple of reasons. One is the increased pace of 5G take up in the world. We’re of course seeing big demand in the early launch markets. But we’re also seeing 5G demand developing in other parts of the world as well. We are talking the Middle East and other parts of Asia. We see a slow pickup in Europe but we expect that to pick up as well. We’ve been quite bullish on the 5G development and see a number of opportunities for us there. Then we have also made an acquisition of Kathrein which adds sales to us. We see a tailwind from the currency as well.

Focused On Continued Investment In Market Share

We cannot see any impact on our order books as of today (due to concern about Huawei). If anything the geopolitical situation has caused more uncertainty. I would be honest to say more uncertainty normally leads to lower investments. That’s more what we’re seeing than actually anything else. We are we’re not seeing any positive news from this.

As part of our strategy we laid out in 2017, an important part was to gain market share and gain footprint. We are already investing in taking contracts and new market share. That’s quite clearly the case. What we try to do is to be disciplined and actually take contracts where we have a clear competitive advantage and clear technological advantage. We’ve seen that we continue to gain contracts. They are margin dilutive in the short term but very positive in the long term. They have impacted the third quarter. It’s a very marginal impact but nevertheless it, of course, impacts us. Going forward, we see no dramatic changes compared to the third quarter but we will continue to take those contracts.