Omdia: Huawei increases global RAN market share due to China hegemony
Due to China’s enormous mobile network market (where foreign vendors are mostly shut out), Huawei remained the world’s largest vendor of radio access network (RAN) equipment – a market worth about $35 billion last year – according to Omdia (an Informa owned company). In 2023, the Chinese behemoth had a 31.3% share of the global RAN market. Omdia says Huawei’s market share was up by an unspecified amount in 2024, due to “a more favorable regional mix as well as market share gains in emerging markets,” according to Remy Pascal, principal analyst at Omdia.
Huawei recently reported a 22% increase in sales last year, to 860 billion Chinese yuan (US$ 118.6 billion), and it looks in better shape than its ailing western rivals. Its share of the global 5G networks market appears to have grown, according to the market research firm.
Omdia’s findings seems further to highlight the futility of U.S. sanctions against Huawei, originally imposed by Donald Trump in his first term as U.S. President and then expanded by President Joe Biden.
Image Credit: Huawei
China still lacks the ability to make the most advanced chips featuring the tiniest transistors. But technical workarounds or loopholes in trade rules have enabled Huawei to revive its smartphone business and remain competitive in networks. Late last year, telco executives who spoke on condition of anonymity said there had been no discernible impact on the quality of its products. And Ericsson continues to regard Huawei as its chief rival.
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“After two years of significant acceleration and exceptionally high investment in 2021 and 2022, and two years of steep decline in 2023 and 2024, Omdia expects 2025 to be a year of stabilization for the RAN market,” said Remy Pascal of Omdia. “Different regions will follow different trajectories, but at a global level, the market is expected to be flattish. North America has returned to growth in 2024 and we expect this to continue, we also expect a positive trajectory in some emerging markets.”
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Other results and forecasts from Omdia:
- The total global RAN market (which includes hardware and software but not services) was just over $35 billion last year, which represented a 12 percent decline on the previous year.
- There was a very slight drop in the aggregate market share of the top five RAN equipment vendors – Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung. In 2023, Omdia had that figure at about 95%. In 2024, it was roughly 94%.
- Ericsson was one of the main gainers last year thanks to its huge AT&T (non) OpenRAN contract.
- As a result, Nokia lost market share in the U.S., but claims that its global RAN footprint grew by 18,000 sites in 2024.
- Tejas Networks, an Indian RAN equipment vendor (not in the top five) that landed a large 4G contract with state-owned BSNL was another winner.
- Global RAN revenue will be “essentially flat” this year and marked by “low single digit percentage growth” outside China.
- A “positive trajectory” in emerging Asian markets as well as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America is forecast. Europe risks falling behind other parts of the world in mobile network markets.
Top RAN vendors, full year 2024 RAN revenue:
|
Global |
Global ex-China |
|---|---|
|
Huawei |
Ericsson |
|
Ericsson |
Nokia |
|
Nokia |
Huawei |
|
ZTE |
Samsung |
|
Samsung |
ZTE |
Top RAN vendors, full year 2024 RAN revenue, top 3 by region:
|
North America |
Asia & Oceania |
Europe |
Middle East and Africa |
Latin America & the Caribbean |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Ericsson |
Huawei |
Ericsson |
Huawei |
Huawei |
|
Nokia |
ZTE |
Nokia |
Nokia |
Ericsson |
|
Samsung |
Ericsson |
Huawei |
Ericsson |
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Dell’Oro Group’s most recent RAN report a few weeks ago stated that the global RAN market is expected to improve slightly over the short term, but the long-term outlook remains subdued. “The underlying message we have communicated for some time has not changed,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President for RAN market research at Dell’Oro Group. “Regional imbalances will impact the market dynamics over the short term while the long-term trajectory remains flat. This is predicated on the assumption that new RAN revenue streams from private wireless and FWA, taken together with MBB-based capacity growth, are not enough to offset slower MBB coverage-based capex,” said Dell’Oro’s Stefan Pongratz.
References:
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/huawei-defies-us-to-grow-market-share-as-ran-decline-ends-omdia
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The refusal of European government administrations to evict Huawei frustrates the bosses of Ericsson and Nokia, the Nordic vendors that would most obviously benefit from it. Börje Ekholm, Ericsson’s CEO, was critical of the Swedish government’s decision to ban Huawei from its 5G network in late 2020. That was probably because he feared Chinese reprisals would hurt Ericsson, whose China revenues fell 46% in 2021. More recently, however, Ekholm has grumbled about the probability of losing market share in some parts of the world to aggressive Chinese rivals. Earlier this month, he sounded doubtful that new opportunities to replace high-risk vendors in Europe would ever materialize.
But Justin Hotard, who succeeded Pekka Lundmark as Nokia’s CEO in April, struck a more optimistic tone last week. “I think that’s significant,” he said on a call with reporters, referring to Virkkunen’s desire to clamp down on high-risk vendors. “We see that as an opportunity for us given our market position.”
Nokia did, notably, land a contract last November to replace Huawei at about 3,000 of Deutsche Telekom’s 5G sites in Germany – roughly 8% of the RAN total, according to data the operator included in its capital markets day presentations last year. The deal was a long time in the making and is curious given that Deutsche Telekom opposes efforts to evict Huawei. But the introduction of a third RAN vendor could seem prudent. German authorities, under mounting domestic, EU and US pressure, might always decide on a tougher approach, as the UK previously did.
The longer they and other countries resist, the worse things could be for Ericsson and Nokia. RAN sales flattened year-over-year in the first quarter of 2025, after steep drops in 2023 and 2024 that lowered annual revenues last year by more than a fifth, to about $35 billion, compared with the figure in 2022, according to the analyst company Omdia. This year, Omdia expects “low single-digit percentage growth.” But market share gains would put the Nordic companies in a much healthier position, and meaningful gains could only come at Huawei’s expense, unless Ericsson and Nokia were trampling over each other’s turf.
Job cuts shrank the size of the Nokia workforce from about 86,700 employees in 2023 to 75,600 last December, and the axe has fallen heavily on mobile. In a restructuring that harks back to an earlier era and could precipitate further cuts, Nokia is moving several corporate functions outside individual units and into a group-wide layer. Additional cuts within mobile would now be hard to realize without hurting critical research and development activities.
Ericsson, while in stronger RAN shape, is also fighting market stagnation made worse by US tariffs and the weakness of the US dollar. It looks unhealthily reliant on American business, generating 44% of its second quarter revenues in the US. Work in India has seemingly dried up, following a frenzied deployment of 5G networks, and China revenues fell by 37% year-over-year for the recent second quarter, to about 2.2 billion Swedish kronor ($230 million). To protect margins, Ericsson cut about 6,000 jobs last year, or 6% of its total workforce.
Telcos, which have not profited from 5G, are in no mood for early Huawei swap-outs that would gobble funds. The biggest opportunity for other vendors seemed to be a Vodafone RAN tender encompassing 170,000 base station sites across Europe and Africa, according to the operator’s annual report last year. But Vodafone’s sale of businesses in Hungary, Italy and Spain, and the exclusion from the tender of joint network ventures in the UK and the Netherlands, are likely to have dramatically lowered that number.
Whether or not Huawei deserves its EU and US blacklisting, the danger is that Europe’s continued reliance on it further weakens Nokia’s mobile networks business. Added to Europe’s other negatives, it could ultimately persuade Ericsson to follow the journey of the similarly named Leif Erikson, the Viking thought to have sailed to America more than 1,000 years ago. A relocation of headquarters from Sweden to the US was threatened by Ekholm last year. For a region increasingly short of big companies with global influence, that would surely be a disaster.
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/europe-s-love-of-huawei-is-crushing-ericsson-and-nokia