Ericsson warns profit margins at RAN business set to worsen

Ericsson  on Friday reported lower than expected 4th-quarter core earnings as sales of 5G equipment slowed in high-margin markets such as the United States, sending the Swedish company’s shares to their lowest since 2018.

Ericsson is the latest tech company to show the impact of customers tightening belts amid concerns about a global economic slowdown. Others have been cutting staff, including Microsoft  (10,000) and Google parent Alphabet (12,000) which have announced thousands of job cuts this week while Amazon had announce 10,000 layoffs several weeks ago.

Ericsson has already announced plans to cut costs by 9 billion crowns ($880 million) by the end of 2023.

Chief Financial Officer Carl Mellander told Reuters that would involve reducing consultants, real estate and also employee headcount.  “It’s different from geography to geography, some are starting now, and we’ll take it unit by unit, considering the labour laws of different countries,” Mellander said, referring to the cuts.

Mellander declined to say if the job cuts would be similar to 2017 when Ericsson laid off thousands of employees and focused on research to return the company to profitability.

Last week, the company said it would book a 2.3 billion Swedish crown ($220 million) provision for an expected fine from U.S. authorities for breach of a settlement reached in 2019.

Ericsson’s net sales rose in the fourth quarter, but margins, net income and core earnings fell.  Its gross margin for the fourth quarter of 2022 fell to 41.4% from 43.2%.

Ericsson said it expected a fall in margin in its Networks business to persist through the first half of 2023, but the effect of cost savings to emerge in the second quarter.

JPMorgan analysts said given the fall in margins and higher investments, they would expect 2023 earnings to decline by a double digit percentage.

Inge Heydorn, partner and fund manager at investment firm GP Bullhound, said: “The fourth quarter shows once again that the U.S. has a big impact on Ericsson’s margins.”

With U.S. customers such as Verizon tightening their purse strings, Ericsson is hoping newer markets such as India can provide some growth.  Its South East Asia, Oceania and India market was the only one to grow in the quarter, rising 21%, accounting for 13% of the company’s business.

The company’s fourth-quarter adjusted operating earnings, excluding restructuring charges, fell to 9.3 billion Swedish crowns from 12.8 billion a year earlier.  That was short of the 11.22 billion expected by analysts, Refinitiv Eikon data showed.  Net sales rose 21% to 86 billion crowns, beating estimates of 84.2 billion.

A settlement of a patent deal with Apple (AAPL.O) last month resulted in revenue of 6 billion crowns, but Ericsson also took 4 billion crowns in charges, including a provision for a potential fine from U.S. regulators and divestments.

However, there was some good news.

  1. Ericsson said it expects significant patent revenue growth over the coming 18-24 months.
  2. Ericsson, outside China, remains the company to beat in 5G. Its share of the market for radio access networks (RANs) appears to have increased several years in a row – from 33% in 2017 to 39% now.
  3. Ericsson is healthily profitable, which could not be said when CEO Ekholm took charge in 2017.
  4. Boosted by recent takeover activity and a major licensing deal with Apple, its headline sales for the final quarter of 2022 were up 21%, to 86 billion Swedish kronor (US$8.4 billion), compared with the same period a year before.

However, Ericsson has experienced one of its biggest profit slumps since the first half of Ekholm’s tenure. Hurt by higher costs and SEK4 billion ($390 million) worth of one-off charges – relating to US fines, write-downs and divestiture – its net income dropped by 39%, to SEK6.2 billion ($600 billion). Worse, all the various profit margins thinned, with Ericsson’s closely monitored EBIT (earnings before interest and tax) margin shrinking to just 9.1%, from 16.1% a year earlier. And the outlook is frosty.

The mini-boom in 5G spending appears to be over – temporarily, at least. Last year, the market for RAN products, where Ericsson now generates about 70% of its revenues, grew by around 5%, according to data from Dell’Oro, a market research firm that Ericsson uses. This year, RAN market sales are expected to fall by 1%. And in North America, responsible for nearly 30% of Ericsson’s overall revenues, Dell’Oro predicts they will drop by a worrying 7%.

After investing heavily in network rollouts during the last couple of years, many operators are cutting their expenditure amid signs of an economic downturn, and reducing the equipment stockpiles they built up when supplies were tight. “We expect operators to adjust inventory levels as the supply situation eases and we plan for these trends to continue during the first half of 2023,” said Ekholm on Ericsson’s earnings call today.

“The first half is really where we’ll see the sizeable inventory adjustments,” said Ekholm, answering questions asked by analysts. “Operators can sweat assets for a couple of quarters but it cannot be done much more [than that] because of the traffic growth underneath. That is the way to model it.” Ericsson’s expectation is that total mobile data traffic worldwide will grow by a factor of five between 2022 and 2028.

Given the market slowdown, turbulence of the last year and seemingly endless difficulties at smaller units, it is easy to forget that Ericsson remains a solid and successful business. But it has become more reliant on RAN sales under Ekholm – generating more than 70% of its revenues in that market last year, compared with just 47% in 2016. Ekholm clearly restored Ericsson’s reputation as a RAN provider. Amid the slowdown in that sector (zero growth forecast by Dell’Oro through 2027), his big challenge now is to prove it can thrive elsewhere.

Andrew Gardiner, analyst at Citi, said the announcements demonstrated the “significant challenges” the company faced this year. “We view Ericsson’s outlook as one of fundamentals deteriorating in the next quarter or two, as it aims to improve in the second half and beyond,” he added.

References:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ericsson-quarterly-earnings-miss-expectations-2023-01-20/

https://www.lightreading.com/5g/ericsson-feels-squeeze-as-big-customers-slash-5g-spending/d/d-id/782803?

https://www.ft.com/content/dd5cb329-f5bd-4b78-bde1-ca7510daaa7a

 

One thought on “Ericsson warns profit margins at RAN business set to worsen

  1. From Mike Dano of Light Reading:

    Niklas Heuveldop, the head of Ericsson’s North American business, said he’s preparing to cut 5-7% of his company’s workforce in the area. The cuts are part of Ericsson’s global round of layoffs that will see a total of 8,500 employees leave the company.

    Ericsson employs roughly 105,000 people across the world, and 12,000 of those are in North America. In the US specifically, Ericsson counts 9,000 employees.

    “I think the leadership has been wise about keeping a tight ship,” Heuveldop told Light Reading, arguing that the company’s current round of layoffs are relatively light, given the slowdown in operator spending. He attributed the situation to Ericsson’s moderate rate of growth while supporting early 5G demand. “We’re coming off an exceptional period of acceleration,” he said.

    Ericsson’s Networks division is the company’s biggest, and North America is the company’s biggest region by sales. Heuveldop said AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in the US have all been furiously buying Ericsson equipment (alongside equipment from the likes of Samsung and Nokia) to add midband spectrum to their 5G networks. Now, he said, that spending is slowing as the operators finish their early network buildout efforts.

    However, “we’re not done yet,” Heuveldop said.

    Heuveldop argued that Ericsson expects mobile traffic volumes to grow 4x through 2028, and he said operators will need to further invest in their networks to keep pace with that growth. Additionally, he pointed to the new fixed wireless offerings from T-Mobile and Verizon as another catalyst for growth.

    Specifically, he said that network operators throughout North America will continue to purchase Ericsson equipment to expand their 5G networks into rural areas, and to then reinforce those networks with small cells and indoor networking equipment.

    But big mobile network operators aren’t Ericsson’s only potential customers. The company is also pursuing enterprise customers through the sale of private wireless networking equipment, an effort underscored by Ericsson’s recent $1.1 billion purchase of Cradlepoint.

    “We see a lot of enterprises ‘cutting the cord,'” Heuveldop said. He said such customers are shifting all of their operations onto 5G, essentially removing the need for wired enterprise connections.

    However, Heuveldop said enterprise equipment suppliers – those that build robots, sensors, manufacturing machinery and mixed reality devices – need to support 5G more broadly. “The device ecosystem is not where it needs to be,” he said. “We need the ecosystem to start maturing.”

    Finally, Heuveldop nodded to the GSMA’s new “Open Gateway” initiative, under which more than a dozen big mobile network operators around the globe are pledging to develop standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) into their respective networks. He described that announcement as a “breakthrough” because it could position operators (Ericsson’s main customers) to develop new ways to make more money.

    https://www.lightreading.com/5g-and-beyond/ericssons-heuveldop-prepares-to-cut-jobs-but-stays-upbeat/d/d-id/783488?

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