Ex-Ericsson engineer here, I was at the company for 13 years. Regarding the size - lot of people don't realize because it hasn't been a front-facing company since the collapse of its phones business, but it really is invested in tech right across the board - from developing its own real-time operating systems to its own massive-core chipsets used in base stations, to its own ML platforms. Just the research arm of Ericsson is huge in itself, I think they have around 60 000 patents granted, and are doing everything from fundamental RF research, to quantum machine learning. Not to mention a huge managed services business that helps telecom operators run their networks.
Regarding the lay-offs - telecom industry is essentially a sinewave. The "good" period (e.g. from 5G prototype to complete network migration to 5G) lasts approximately 5 years. The way contracts are signed means that you sell X number of network nodes (base stations, core nodes, etc) and some kind of support contract to go with it. After that, there is nothing. Very different from public cloud providers where you pay as you go. Ericsson and most telecom vendors still haven't figured out how to monetize this.
If this was true then we would have seen similar layoffs between UMTS(3G) and LTE(4G) and between LTE and 5G. Is there any evidence of that? Also Telcos around the world are still rolling out 5G and much of the tech's promise of Edge Computing have not yet been deployed or realized.
>"The company faces mounting competition from China’s Huawei and Finland’s Nokia as well as weak emerging markets and falling spending by telecoms operators with demand for next-generation 5G technology still years away."
The layoffs are attributed to three things:
1. Competition
2. A slump in investment in emerging markets.
3. Falling spending(it's not clear from the press relase if that was just spending for Ericsson's gear.)
Additionally there was no global Telecom industry slump in 2016. Just in the US alone it was something of a boom year with lots of activity. See:
They make the software that runs mobile networks and part of the hardware (as in radio towers, even chips in the past), various special purpose hardware used in the past is also still in use. They also operate these networks as a service to telecom providers. The goods and services they provide are spread pretty wide.
Does manufacturing account for a large portion of those 100k+ employees? Ericsson is not a fabless semiconductor firm, after all. They need to produce things like enclosures and PCB's (perhaps that is done by 3rd parties).
Yeah that surprised me as well. It would be interesting to get a ‘tech company ordered by headcount’ list but it would make me nervous the listing would result in some executive deciding they should layoff more people.
Why? Ericsson has always been a back-end networking and telecommunication company.
Erlang was created, at Ericsson, for a telephony switch.
It's shuttered the consumer side entirely (Sony Ericsson was a joint venture, not a group), it's one of the lead developers in mobile telephony, as well as the lead IP holder in the domain.
In Europe also a large player in the broadcast space, though Red Bee Media (formerly Ericsson Broadcast and Media Services): BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Canal+, as well as Channel 4 and Channel 5's VOD. RBM is also a huge provider of closed captioning, signing, and audio description worldwide, by far the largest in europe for more than 15 years (after they acquired Mundovisión and Titelbild).
If the parent was typing the above message on a phone attached to their telecom network, there is a high probability their user and control plane traffic was going through Ericsson systems.
I didnt expect that Ericsson even had 8500 employees to lay off. Kind of disappeared from the radar after the mobile phone era. (Yes i know they still make equipment)
Regarding the lay-offs - telecom industry is essentially a sinewave. The "good" period (e.g. from 5G prototype to complete network migration to 5G) lasts approximately 5 years. The way contracts are signed means that you sell X number of network nodes (base stations, core nodes, etc) and some kind of support contract to go with it. After that, there is nothing. Very different from public cloud providers where you pay as you go. Ericsson and most telecom vendors still haven't figured out how to monetize this.