Possible Chancellor acts as if Ericsson and Infineon don’t exist
“Norbert Röttgen, CDU politician with aspirations for the party chairmanship and the chancellorship,” writes Achim Sawall says, “European companies were not allowed to roll out 5G in China … Beijing would never even think of opening its 5G network to foreign providers.”
China Mobile and China Telecom/Unicom are Ericsson’s largest customers for 5G, I believe. Sawall adds, “The Europeans received over 40 percent of the core network orders from China Mobile.” This is widely reported and the German language press called Sawall on his error.
He refuses to admit his mistake, like a Washington politician. (All parties.) It’s highly likely that “confirmation bias” makes it impossible for him to see facts in front of his face.
Around a decade ago, China allocated 10% of its telecom market to each of Alcatel, Ericsson, and Nokia, Alcatel CTO Marcus Weldon mentioned at the Brooklyn 5G conference. The Nokia purchase of Alcatel had been announced. Marcus said he wasn’t sure whether Alcatel’s share of the Chinese market would be added to Nokia’s.
The Chinese allocated nearly a third of their market to European companies under threat of a ban on Huawei. China and Europe came to an agreement on industrial policy.
Nokia essentially gave up on the Chinese 5G radio market about two years ago. China Telecom/Unicom share 200 MHz of spectrum, twice as much as the Europeans. Nokia didn’t bother adapting to that. It made a desperate attempt to win a piece of the last big orders. The Chinese press reported Nokia had undercut the prices of Huawei and Ericsson. But the equipment wasn’t fit for purpose.
Suri did save a large share of the router market, where Nokia has an excellent product.
Sawall is the one German reporter I know who consistently sees through the bullocks fed the press. He also broke the story – from a DT source – that DT’s low-band 5G by design is slower than it’s 4G.