Without Sony, Ericsson finally becoming broadband player

[Commentary] Back in the day, when it came to mobile infrastructure, there were three large companies: Motorola, Ericsson and Nortel. They were collectively called M.E.N. And often, thanks to their monopolistic practices, they were essentially M.E.N behaving badly. Nevertheless, in time, two of them fell victim to changes in technologies and their own corporate actions, while market forces in the form of competition from Huawei changed the landscape forever. However, one of them survived: Ericsson. The Swedish telecom giant has managed to transform itself by betting big on one simple trend: the demand for wireless broadband is going to be huge. In doing so, the company kept building leading edge 3G+ products, bet heavily on LTE and pushed harder into emerging telecom markets such as India and China. Today, when it comes to mobile, they are one of the two major players, Huawei being the other.

Ericsson announced it’s selling off its stake in the ill-fated Sony Ericsson phone handset venture to Sony for about $1.5 billion. It’s a great move by Ericsson. Ericsson becomes a pure play broadband company: selling wired broadband and wireless broadband hardware along with providing managed services. It’s also time for Ericsson to start thinking about the evolution of the mobile cloud and how it can build hardware for that shift. In doing so, Ericsson will remain the other viable option against Huawei, which has become the PacMan of telecom.