Sony Ericsson boosts Ericsson

HOW THE tables have turned. Ericsson has just admitted that: "The growing earnings in Sony Ericsson contributed significantly to [its] improved result."

That contrasts sharply to nearly pulling the plug on its joint venture with Sony some four years ago.

Net income for Ericsson grew by 27 per cent with Sony Ericsson's help. Yet, back in September 2002, former CEO, Kurt Hellstroem, announced that he wasn't going to let the venture become a bottomless pit.

Interestingly, current CEO, Carl-Henric Svanberg, highlighted the fact that Vodafone had awarded Ericsson the industry's first European-wide contract for spare parts management. "With this move, Vodafone has taken a new, exciting, trend-setting approach with considerable cost savings," he said.

The company's remarks about data traffic are also fascinating. "We have seen a doubling of traffic in mobile broadband networks over the last six months," the company report stated.

It claims that data traffic in the world's mobile networks is expected to exceed voice traffic by 2010-2011. It also estimated that mobile data traffic had tripled in 2006. Plus, thanks to HSPA, packet data traffic has doubled in the last six months in the 3G/HSPA markets it monitors.

Part of this is also down to new features such as Super EDGE which offers 1 Mbit/s downlink. That's an interesting development which had escaped the INQ's radar until now.

What Ericsson says about cellular subscriptions is also noteworthy. Net additions apparently amounted to 136 million in Q1 2007. That brings the total number of subscriptions to 2.88 billion.

Out of those, 2.43 billion are GSM/W-CDMA. Curious then, that some INQ readers regard our editorial coverage of those two technologies as evidence of our 'bias'.

Anyway, Ericsson says W-CDMA subscriptions grew some 13 million to 113 million which shows it is starting to take off at last.

Ericsson's estimated infrastructure market shares are impressive, too. It says it has around 40 per cent of the GSM market; 38 per cent of the standard 3G market; but 50 per cent of the HSPA (enhanced 3G) market.

No surprises from the admission that sales in the Asia Pacific region soared by 36 per cent with both China and Indian largely to blame. µ

L'INQ
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