The Dell’Oro market research company lists the vendors in order for sales in 2018 as Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, Cisco, ZTE, Ciena and Samsung.
Dell’Oro has produced its table – see image – by combining the results from all its 2018 infrastructure research programmes. The numbers do not include phones and other terminals.
The research shows the position of the seven companies in percentage terms, but not absolute figures in dollars.
However, Ericsson’s sales in 2018, reported in January, were the equivalent of $22.5 billion. If, as Dell’Oro says, Ericsson has 13% of the market, the worldwide telecoms infrastructure market was worth around $175 billion in 2018.
The figures show that after three years of decline, the overall telecoms equipment market grew 1% year-over-year in 2018, says Dell’Oro.
The positive turn in the year was due to higher demand for broadband access, optical transport, microwave, and mobile RAN.
The remaining equipment sectors declined in the year. The two largest equipment markets in the year were mobile radio access network (RAN) and optical transport.
The company says: “The worldwide mobile RAN market surprised on the upside and performed better than expected in 2018. In addition to the strong focus on LTE and LTE-Advanced, the shift toward 5G NR [new radio] continued to accelerate throughout the year.”
Huawei’s revenue share continued to improve in 2018, gaining about two percentage points of share annually in each of the past five years. The Chinese company’s market share stood at about 29% in 2018, the figures show.
During this period, Nokia’s and Ericsson’s market shares (17% and 13% respectively) declined about one percentage point annually on average until 2018 when both Scandinavian vendors held their market share flat.
ZTE’s share which had typically been at 10% dropped two percentage points in 2018 due to the US ban that caused the company to shut down portions of its business during the second quarter. It’s now at 8%, Dell’Oro’s graph shows.
The Dell’Oro research results combined into this report include: broadband access, carrier IP telephony, microwave transmission and mobile backhaul, mobile RAN, optical transport, service provider router and carrier Ethernet switch, telecom capex, wide area internet of things (IoT) and wireless packet core.
