Sweden: Ericsson outlines growth plans.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

Mobile equipment vendor Ericsson this week laid out its plans to grow annual net sales by 4-10 percent through 2013 and operating income by 5-15 percent in the same period.

 At a management briefing in New York yesterday, president and CEO Hans Vestberg (pictured) said the world’s largest mobile network infrastructure vendor will focus on a number of major areas: expanding its presence in large and fast-growing markets (eg the US, South Korea and Thailand), increasing its share of operators’ capital and operating expenditure, entering into partnerships and M&A activity, moving further into new growth areas such as machine-to-machine (and outside the core telecoms sector to utilities, health and transport) and “portfolio momentum in mobile broadband, managed services and BSS/OSS transformation.” 

Vestberg added that opportunities in the company’s traditional mobile network business (where it has a 32 percent market share) remain strong, with roughly 5 billion mobile broadband subscriptions expected by 2016, with roughly 55 percent of total mobile subscriptions being broadband.

Ericsson’s need to diversify comes as the Swedish network-equipment giant faces mounting competition from rivals that are merging, as well as from up-start Chinese vendors willing to sell their products at a lower price. At its Business Innovation Forum in California earlier this week the vendor talked of its vision of a Networked Society,’ with chief strategist Douglas Gilstrap claiming the company believes that “anything that should be connected will be connected.” 


The concept made headlines last year when Ericsson predicted that the number of connected devices will surge to 50 billion over the next 10 years, via the widespread use of embedded modules.