https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson

Number of employees

• Decrease 94,000 (2024)

It doesn’t say what those employees worked on, but purely in terms of percentage of headcount, it’s not a massive cut.

What I’d be more concerned about is if it means that non-Chinese 5G is in trouble.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/human-resources/5g-freeze-hits-hard-ericsson-rocked-by-fresh-layoffs-as-sweden-s-telecom-giant-tightens-the-axe/ar-AA1UjGRp

Ericsson has announced that it will be laying off employees as part of a broader effort to improve its financial situation and boost efficiency. The company has been facing a tough telecom equipment market, with carriers spending less than expected on 5G technology. This shift in spending has impacted Ericsson’s revenue growth and profitability.

That does sound like it’s related to the 5G market, though that article doesn’t have particulars.

I remember that a few years back, the US had talked about buying Ericsson or Nokia if they weren’t getting adequate support because they did not want China to have control over the (security-sensitive) 5G infrastructure market.

5G infrastructure is one notable technology area where the US doesn’t have top-tier players, so it got really twitchy about the idea that China might take over the market. It’s also why the US was running around the world a few years back trying to get parties to buy Ericsson or Nokia product rather than Huawei.

If Ericsson is really in trouble on 5G infrastructure, I wonder if that might be reconsidered.

searches

It looks like I’m not the only one thinking about that.

https://www.ft.com/content/2834381f-7a21-4c51-b45f-b4b9dd38c818

But what eye-catching proposals has Trump yet to resurrect from his first stint in office? There is one in particular that strikes me as intriguing now as it was then: that the US should buy Nokia or Ericsson, or even both.

William Barr, attorney-general under Trump, suggested in 2020 that the US should actively consider taking a “controlling stake” in either or both of the Finnish and Swedish telecoms equipment makers “either directly or through a consortium of private American and allied companies”.

Like many Trump proposals, the idea was first met by gasps of disbelief. The US government doesn’t tend to buy foreign companies. But as is the case in some of the president’s outlandish schemes, there was a kind of rationale to the proposed purchase — and one that has not gone away in the meantime.

Telecoms equipment manufacturing is one of the very few areas of technology where the US is not just behind but not present at all. Reliable networks are vital for business and consumers alike, as well as becoming increasingly essential in warfare, as Ukraine is demonstrating with its drone warfare.

“They have not solved that issue in the US,” says Anna Wieslander, Northern Europe director at US think-tank the Atlantic Council.

Nokia and Ericsson have an effective duopoly in much of the western world thanks to American pressure on allies not to use Huawei, their main rival, which has close ties to the Chinese state. But they have struggled to draw as much benefit out of that as many might have expected, with both experiencing disappointing profitability in recent years.

What is more, Ericsson and Nokia have failed to garner full-blooded support from the EU — all the more strange for being perhaps the one sector where Europe has technology dominance.

Like, I’d think that one of several things probably needs to happen:

• Nokia dominates. I don’t think that the US cares that much about consolidation in the market.

• The US creates some kind of domestic competitor. Maybe Cisco or someone moves into the market (I understand that they do sell some 5G infrastructure, but not on the level that Ericsson and Nokia and Huawei do).

• The US buys one of Ericsson or Nokia and provides support.

• The US decides that it isn’t worried about 5G from a security standpoint (e.g. say that we decide that the real future is in some other system).