Iain Morris

1 week ago | lightreading.com | Iain Morris

A cozy relationship with Huawei in the Trump era looks increasingly awkward for Deutsche Telekom while it generates a growing share of its profits in the US. Time in the job hasn't made Europe's longest-serving telecom chiefs sound fonder of the region they call home. Börje Ekholm, now into his ninth year at Ericsson, derides Europe as a "museum" and seems happiest when he's in the US, where the Swedish vendor last year bagged 40% of its revenues and probably an even bigger share of its profits.

1 week ago | lightreading.com | Iain Morris

Ericsson's first quarter ended about two weeks ago, but its finalization of the standard earnings report may have been unusually last minute this time around. On April 11, the US government took fright at the possible impact of tariffs on various electronic components used by Ericsson and other kit makers and decided to exempt those from the taxes. This limits the impact of US tariffs to a single percentage point of Ericsson's gross margin for the current quarter, said the company.

1 week ago | lightreading.com | Iain Morris

Staff at Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HPE, Nokia and many other manufacturers of network products spent part of last weekend squinting at strange numerical codes in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule maintained online by the US International Trade Commission. They would have been trying to figure out if the components they source from China were covered by the US tariff exemptions announced on April 11. But they may have wasted their time.

1 week ago | lightreading.com | Iain Morris

The 'value destruction' of the Vonage takeover, prioritization of US business and an all-or-nothing bet on 5G could be seen as black marks against Ericsson's boss. When Börje Ekholm took charge of Ericsson in 2017, the Swedish maker of mobile network equipment was a mess. Sales the previous year had dropped 15%, on a constant-currency basis, and net profits had shriveled from 13.7 billion Swedish kronor (US$1.4 billion) in 2015 to just SEK1.9 billion ($190 million).

1 week ago | lightreading.com | Iain Morris

The need to maintain ancient fixed and mobile technologies for a tiny amount of usage puts a financial burden on Virgin Media O2 and BT in the UK. Every now and then the UK's tabloid newspapers will publish a technology-driven, human-interest story.