Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei Technologies has overtaken Sweden’s Ericsson in terms of half-yearly revenue from global operations.
Huawei on July 24 reported revenue of $16.1 billion in sales for this year’s first-half ended June 30, surpassing Ericsson's $15.25 billion during the same period.
A Chinese media report said Huawei’s latest income is for the first time larger than the Swedish telecom player. Huawei was the world’s second-largest equipment manufacturer earlier.
This comes even as Samsung Electronics surpassed Nokia in the global handset market. Samsung shipped 92 million handsets worldwide compared with 83 million for Nokia in the first quarter this year.
Huawei was optimistic about the operating performance and profitability for remaining period of the year, Ms Meng Wanzhou, Chief Financial Officer, said recently.
However, analysts pointed out that Huawei’s revenue mix is different from that of Ericsson since the Chinese vendor also supplies handsets and data dongles.
Ericsson is still by far the largest cellular infrastructure maker in the world, according to market watchers.
Ever since Ericsson exited from the handset joint venture with Sony, it does not show revenues from the handset segment. But it had a boost from its acquisition of network systems vendor Telcordia this year.
In India, Ericsson has a stronger presence in the network equipment portfolio, but Huawei sells handsets and has presence in the enterprise business.
“We have been fortunate to have 25 per cent market share in 3G footprint in India. This has helped us to grow, along with the launch of devices and enterprise business in October,” a Huawei India spokesperson said.
Ericsson India refused to comment on competition with Huawei.
The two companies are probably the only telecom vendors which are growing, despite the poor global economy and currencies’ fluctuations. They are likely to keep leapfrogging one another.