There is a danger, perhaps, to make too much of Ericsson’s victory lap in the UK mobile market – in a fifth-round 3GPP contest, on a late-era 5G SA network, against its oldest and fiercest rival. After all, it is the narrowest of margins: a 55/45 split, in its favour, for about £700 million of new RAN upgrade work with VMO2. But you can’t really blame the Swedish firm for sticking two fingers up at Nokia, either – whether as a victory taunt, or just a taunt. Nokia has still won some, yes, but such generational projects are hard to come by, and Ericsson continues to steal business away – in certain markets. Nokia might argue there is better work in longhaul optical systems right now, plus in higher-margin core networks, where it holds its own – and so it is making up the difference in the backend.

But Nokia versus Ericsson goes deep; it is ‘tribal’ (with apologies) – like Liverpool and Man United, or the Beatles and the Stones. Shared histories, shared visions, shared workloads – grudges and rivalries, born of familiarity and respect. But their stories are diverging, and – not wishing to overplay such a parochial fix-up, but mindful of their synced messaging, and Ericsson’s triumphalism – Nokia is losing at its first line of business: radio networks, where the margins are slimmest but the symbolism is fattest. Deal by deal, Ericsson is winning in the (western) markets that matter most. AT&T in the US in 2023 was the big one, but Verizon went to Samsung in 2020, T-Mobile was dicey for a while, and VodafoneThree (sharing infra with VMO2) set the UK template last year. 

In terms of straight mobile infrastructure, the one place Nokia is winning – as a pioneer firm and market leader – is the one place it is quitting: private networks. Yes, we can argue about the semantics – that Nokia will sell macro systems to ‘mission-critical’ utilities and railways, and RAN units to industrial campuses (sometimes with its old MPW/DAC systems, on license to a new owner). But it’s like that Micky Flanagan sketch; it might not be out-out, but it is still out – of a market that it helped to build, which it has 50 percent of (whole-market share, not single-customer share). Private 5G might be niche and difficult, but is innovative and influential – where critical cellular is put to work and serious telcos are made to work as part of the ecosystem; where tech dreams live and die: with the enterprise. 

I mustn’t make too much of it, right? Nokia has its core business to think about, and private 5G takes work. But it is crazy that a genuine aristocrat on the Euro tech scene can’t support a speculative innovation project, highly relevant for enterprise AI. Strategic failure, or strategic discipline? And it will also lose to Ericsson, probably – as the pure-play western 5G master builder, cloud to edge. Funny, chatting with Nokia execs at MWC, before heading to a briefing with Ericsson’s enterprise team: “Tell them, ‘good job’”, they said; “tell them, they got their timing right, and we didn’t”. For a while, Nokia had it right – at the enterprise-end of the 5G game. Time will tell if Hotard’s portfolio harakiri is correct; but it could do with an Ericsson-beating 5G mega deal in its traditional operator heartlands in the meantime.