- By winning the US deal, South Korean giant deals a big blow to Nokia and Ericsson.
- Huawei holds 35.7% market share, followed by Ericsson with 24.6%, Nokia with 15.8%, ZTE with 13.2% and Samsung with 9.3% in the first quarter of this year.
Dubai: Samsung is set to expand its global 5G market share and become a force to reckon with as it tries to take advantage of Huawei’s woes.
By winning the $6.6 billion US Verizon deal and its biggest 5G contract so far, the South Korean giant has dealt a big blow to Nokia and Ericsson.
The contract is valid until December 2025.
The market leader, Huawei, is grappling with US sanctions and the Trump administration is forcing all its allies to shut out the Chinese company.
The big three telecommunications companies in Canada have decided to partner with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung, because public opinion was overwhelmingly against allowing Huawei to build Canada’s 5G networks.
According to Dell’Oro, Huawei is ranked first in the 5G telecom equipment market in the first quarter with a 35.7 per cent market share, followed by Ericsson with 24.6 per cent, Nokia with 15.8 per cent, ZTE with 13.2 per cent and Samsung with 9.3 per cent.
Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE, and Samsung accounted for more than 95% of the market in the first quarter of this year.
Compared to the fourth quarter of 2019 figures, Huawei’s market share grew by 0.4 percentage points and Ericsson’s by 0.8 percentage points. Nokia slipped by 4.5 percentage points, ZTE grew by 3 percentage points and Samsung slipped by 1.2 percentage points.
The Korean giant is working with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and KDDI to develop 5G business models.
“With this latest long-term strategic contract, we will continue to push the boundaries of 5G innovation to enhance mobile experiences for Verizon’s customers,” Samsung said in an emailed statement.
Will new players be on the horizon?
An industry expert said that the world’s largest memory chip and smartphone vendor can make big inroads into the 5G space as telecom operators are looking at virtualisation and open source platforms.
According to research firm Dell’Oro Group, the worldwide sales of virtualised Open RAN technologies are forecasted to grow at double-digit rates over the next five years with cumulative Open RAN investments – including hardware, software, and firmware excluding services – projected to surpass $5 billion over the forecast period.
Countries such as the UK and India are phasing out Huawei equipment from their 5G infrastructure due to security concerns.
Rabih Dabboussi, Senior Vice-President for Global Sales and Marketing at Rakuten Mobile, had told TechChannel News recently that the telecom industry will look different in the next five to seven years with the advent of virtualised and open networks.
He said that they are the only operator in the world that is 100% cloud-native and fully virtualised, which means that they don’t use any proprietary or legacy infrastructure.
“If we succeed in our mission, in five to seven years from now, the telecom industry is going to look significantly different and those who adopt these new virtualised, containerised and open network infrastructures will thrive,” he said.
An industry expert said that Samsung will play a bigger role in the networking space after the Verizon deal and eye more contracts in the US, Europe and the Middle East.
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