Is Ericsson planning to relocate from Sweden to the U.S.? That would be good for Ericsson’s financials but bad for the communications industry and the world.
Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm recently told Bloomberg that a move “could well happen.” And he would know, right?
I get it. Ericsson, like Nokia, is in an existential battle with Huawei. The EU’s iron-fist regulatory environment and bureaucracy aren’t helping, and geographically, it’s a long way from Kista to the largest economy, the biggest single communications market, and the most powerful nation in the world. (Note that Ericsson’s head of enterprise wireless, Åsa Tamsons, has already made the move to the US, just across the Long Island Sound from me, over in Connecticut… could she be the advanced party?).
From a financial perspective, what’s not to like? On the other hand, there’s more at stake here than just shareholder value. Ericsson is one of only a handful of companies that genuinely grasp the significance of this century’s global shift to a communications-enabled industrial economy and has created a sensible plan to build it using a combination of smart cloud technologies (AI, cloud automation, APIs), resting on a layer of 5G and fiber.
Over the next couple of decades, the countries that stand to benefit most from this — those that will be utterly transformed by it — are in the Global South, which is a current focus for Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei, but not for any U.S. vendors. (America no longer even has a 5G incumbent that could spearhead these deployments, which should be a national embarrassment but isn’t because America, f*** yeah!)
To paraphrase JFK, Ericsson and Nokia choose to go to the Global South not because it is easy, but because that challenge is one they are willing to accept and one they are unwilling to postpone. It is part of their mission and is in the DNA of their best executives.
The U.S. no longer produces JFKs, and I worry that Ericsson’s culture — and its mission of global digitalization — will not survive relocation to the U.S. of Today. At a time when the global digital divide is just starting to narrow, that would be an astonishing tragedy.
Börje probably thinks Ericsson would be “going big” by moving to the U.S. I disagree. Against the backdrop of human history, this would be a deeply parochial and short-termist move that endangers its global vision — and its responsibility as one of the last remaining ethical stalwarts of the communications industry.
Mr. Ekholm, what the communications world needs now is a lot less America and a lot more Sweden. You hold a historic legacy in your hands. Please don’t fumble it for money and a Big Mac meal.
Steve Saunders is a British-born communications analyst, investor, and digital media entrepreneur with a career spanning decades. Beginning as a technology journalist with McGraw-Hill in the 1980s, he later founded Light Reading in 2000, an online media network focusing on telecommunications news, research, and security. He sold Light Reading to UBM in 2005 for $33 million, bought it back in 2014, and resold it to Informa PLC. Awarded an MBE in 2018, he authored three books and serves as Vice Chairman of Laser Light Communications. Steve splits his time between the U.S. and the U.K. with his three sons.
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