Despite Huawei’s challenges, the company has still been ranked among the world’s top 10 most innovative and it is fighting against the Swedish ban, with the court hearings starting tomorrow. Meanwhile, the whole telecom world is buzzing today due to the newly opened telecom market in Ethiopia and several telcos trying to tap the last remaining large market globally. In the U.S. FCC has imposed a new rule that forces the broadcasters to publicly disclose a program being sponsored by a foreign governmental entity and Google rolled out a series of new features that improve their cloud platform. What else is happening in telecom? We have reached the quarterly results report time and one of the long-awaited moments was evaluating how the 5G rollout reflects on the results of the telcos. We will walk you through this and the outstanding estimates for the 5G IoT industry that were shown in the latest market research report.
5G IoT Industry To Reach $40.2 Billion By 2026, CAGR Of 73%
The “5G IoT Market by Component (Hardware, Platform, Connectivity, and Services (Professional and Managed)), Network Type, End-User (Manufacturing, Healthcare, Energy and Utilities, and Automotive and Transportation), and Region – Global Forecast to 2026” has just been released by ResearchAndMarkets.com
According to the report, the global 5G IoT market size that currently stands at just over $2.5 billion will surpass the $40 billion mark by 2026. The estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is 73% in the next five years.
What can this growth be attributed to? The demand for telemedicine, smart grid, connected cars, and automation across several sectors. The managed services segment is forecasted to have the highest CAGR in the next five years.
The largest demand for 5G IoT comes in the healthcare industry, accelerated by Covid-19 and driven by the efficiency and cost reduction that the 5G IoT devices bring to healthcare.
The most promising region in the 5G IoT market will be the Asia Pacific, followed by Europe.
For more on 5G and IoT
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Huawei Ranked Among Top 10 Most Innovative 2021 Companies
Huawei has been chosen as one of the Most Innovative Companies of 2021 by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In their annual report, BCG placed Huawei in the eighth position, recognizing its strength as a global innovator and the ability to scale innovation despite a large number of challenges that Huawei has had to face this year.
Apart from the pandemic and the clear impact that it had on the market, Huawei is continuously going through struggles caused by the curbing regulations that first appeared during the Trump administration and remain pretty much unchanged under the Biden administration.
BCG believes that despite the turbulent circumstances, Huawei remains resilient and provides fresh solutions to the market.
Telecom Market Opens In Ethiopia
Yesterday, the news was dominated by Ethiopia opening the doors for Telecoms and wireless service providers instantly trying to tap the last remaining large market in the world.
MTN Group Ltd. and a consortium led by Vodafone Group Plc have bid for telecommunications licenses in Ethiopia, and now, the country will take a few days to review the offers.
Earlier yesterday, the largest telecom in Kenya, Safaricom Plc said it was bidding for one license together with Vodafone.
Being one of Africa’s most populated nations, Ethiopia is set for a large economic growth next year and becoming the fastest growing economy in Africa, despite battling multiple crises.
“We always wanted quality providers and this is what we have received,” Brook Taye, an adviser in the Finance Ministry said “These are two African giants — the Safaricom-led consortium and MTN — either one or two of the operators will get a license in Ethiopia.”
Telecom Italia’s Olivetti Buys 7.5 Million Shares In SECO’s IPO
Yesterday, SECO announced that the Olivetti unit of Telecom Italia bought 7.5 million shares in the company’s initial public offering (IPO)
SECO is a Tuscany-based high-tech company that develops IoT solutions. The number of shares bought by Telecom Italia amount to 7% of SECO’s final capital and can indicate a partnership.
SECO is expected to start trading on the Milan Stock Exchange on May 5, with the price range between 3.30-4.15 euros per share, and an expected market cap that can reach 45 million euros ($538.36 million).
“SECO has decided to allocate the order in order to start a dialogue with Olivetti, with the aim of building an industrial partnership,” SECO said in a statement.
Swedish Court Will Hear Huawei’s Case Against The 5G Ban On Wednesday
Tomorrow, a Swedish administrative court will start hearing arguments in a case that was filed by Huawei Technologies against the Swedish telecom regulator that has banned the Chinese tech giants from its 5G networks.
Although many European countries are still working on their telecom policies, so far, only the United Kingdom and Sweden have banned Chinese Huawei from supplying 5G network equipment.
In Sweden, Huawei was banned in October on the basis of security risks. The telecom operators that took part in 5G auctions now have until the end of 2024 to remove all of the Chinese gear from their infrastructure.
However, the Swedish law grants companies that are affected by the new legislation to be heard and voice the concerts before the restrictions are imposed.
Under Swedish law, any company affected by new legislation has the right to be heard and given the chance to clarify any concerns before restrictions are imposed.
“Now we will have the opportunity to explain ourselves and let our opinions be heard in a proper way and also deal with all the legal mistakes we believe have been made,” said Kenneth Fredriksen, Huawei’s executive vice president, Central East Europe, and Nordic Region
A PTS spokesman announced that the Swedish regulator will not comment on the case during the ongoing hearing, as opposed to Huawei.
The arguments of both parties will be presented from Wednesday to Friday. The date for delivering the verdict has not been made public yet.
“As long as we are allowed to do business, we will remain in Sweden and then we will fight for the businesses we are allowed to do,” Fredriksen added.
For more on Huawei:
FCC Halting Huawei And China Telecom!
Will Huawei’s 2021 Harmony OS Launch Be A Game Changer?
Ericsson’s Q1 Results Beat The Forecasts
Last week, Sweden’s biggest telecom Ericsson reported their quarterly results, covering Q1 of 2021. The core earnings have surpassed the earlier market estimates.
Quarterly adjusted operating earnings went up and reached 5.3 billion Swedish crowns ($627.9 million), as compared to 4.6 billion crowns at the same time last year. The mean forecast was at 5.0 billion crowns.
Total revenue was the same as last year, standing at just under 50 billion crowns.
A part of Ericsson’s strong results is surely caused by Huawei’s struggle due to bans by several countries and the European telecoms getting the share of the market that otherwise would have been snatched up by Huawei.
Sales at Ericsson’s networks unit grew by 15% and adjusted gross margin rose to 42.9% from 40.4%.
“We are continuing both with the legal track, as well as the negotiation track,” Chief Financial Officer Carl Mellander told Reuters.
“With proactive and continuous measures for supply chain resilience we have to date been able to manage the global semiconductors shortage situation without impact on our customer deliveries,” Chief Executive Borje Ekholm said.
For more on Ericsson:
Ericsson Turning Tables With its IoT Technology
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FCC Requires Broadcasters To Disclose Foreign Government-Sponsored Programs
On Thursday, The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that they have unanimously adopted a new rule that requires the broadcasters to publicly disclose any television or radio content that is sponsored by a foreign government.
The disclosure will be required regardless of whether a foreign governmental entity paid the station directly or indirectly.
“The order increases transparency, ensuring audiences are aware when a foreign government, or its representatives, uses the airwaves to persuade the American public,” the FCC said in a statement.
“We know that foreign entities are purchasing time on broadcast stations in markets across the country, including Chinese government-sponsored programming and Russian government-sponsored programming right here in our nation’s capital,” Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC’s acting chairwoman said, adding that the foreign government-sponsored programs have increased substantially in the past few years.
The National Association of Broadcasters issued their own statement in which they said they supported the overall goal of FCC. However, they added that the new regulation creates “burdens for the vast majority of broadcasters that do not air this content.”
Telecom’s Q1 Reporting Shows Surprising Results About 5G Rollout
We have reached the point of Q1 reporting. For telecoms, one of the most awaited insights was the 5G rollout. Surprisingly, what we have learned from the Q1 results so far is that it is the tower providers and not the mobile operators that hold the power so far.
This was for example shown by Crown Castle that has reported strong Q1 numbers last week, showing that it is benefiting from the 5G deployment.
“We are excited about the increasing level of activity we see in our business as our customers have begun to deploy 5G at scale,” the firm’s chief financial officer Dan Schlanger said, in a statement accompanying the results announcement. “We believe we are well-positioned to support our growing number of customers by providing a comprehensive set of solutions across towers, small cells, and fibre solutions, which are all necessary to build out 5G wireless networks.”
Crown Castle boosted their forecast across all the major metrics, expecting to generate a much-increased profit and earnings.
Google Rolls Out New Features For Its Cloud Platform
Google rolled out several updates for their cloud platform, facilitating the multi-cloud deployment.
Anthos, Google’s cloud platform, was launched at the beginning of 2019, with a telco-specific version a year later.
The new upgrades are either simplifying the platform or making it more consistent across different cloud environments.
Richard Seroter, director of outbound product management at Google Cloud, revealed that the features include Cloud Logging, a brand new connect gateway that will allow organizations to pull and push information to any Anthos cluster or extension of Anthos’ configuration management tool so it covers more cluster types.
“There are some other cloud providers that are offering portions of what we do, maybe a control plane, maybe they’re shipping some of their components to other places,” Seroter said. “But what’s kind of unique from a Google perspective is that we’re kind of treating multi-cloud and these hybrid scenarios a little more seriously.”
“The gist of a lot of this is we’re not necessarily trying to duplicate the public cloud…What we want to do is bring some of the major foundational capabilities to customers wherever they are…We just want to make it easier for customers to make their transition to the cloud. That’s the desired end state here,” he added.
For more news on 5G, IoT, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, and the latest telecom news, come back next week. In the meantime, check out:
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