Cover caption| "President of the Misty Water"
Wen | Feng Ma Niu (WeChat public number: Feng Lun Feng Ma Niu)
Some people say that the story of 5G began as a Central European championship. There are 4 head players, Huawei, ZTE, Nokia and Ericsson, and Samsung is eager to try but can't get the door. Huawei and ZTE, everyone is very familiar, Nokia was the mobile phone enlightener of many people, although in the era of smart phones suddenly fell, but the skinny camel is bigger than the horse, it is not surprising to return to the communication field, only Ericsson has some faces.
In the era of feature phones, Ericsson had joined forces with Sony to try to surround Nokia, and the two fought openly and secretly, but in the end they were ended up by Apple and Google. Since then, Nokia's mobile phone division has sold itself to Microsoft, Ericsson is mired in losses, and these two difficult brothers from Northern Europe have their own cat winter.
This time, why can Ericsson get a piece of the 5G feast?
Ericsson once had a nickname, "Nokia's Shadow Enemy". In fact, while Ericsson set up a telephone system between the rainforest and palace buildings, Nokia was still living on the banks of the Nokia River in Finland, tossing rubber, wood and toilet paper.
In 1878, the Swede Las Magnus Ericsson built his first telephone, which led Ericsson into the history of human communication. But just as the name Sweden was borrowed from Dutch, Ericsson's first phone was "borrowed" from other companies' technologies.
Previously, Las Magnus Ericsson was just a craftsman, working on musical instruments while repairing telegraphs. This year, the local telecommunications dealer commissioned him to adjust a number of Bell company telephones imported from the United States, and he was inspired by this to buy the telephone of Siemens of Germany at his own expense, and after several studies, he finally figured out the technology of producing telephones.
To the embarrassment of Las Magnus Ericsson, Bell bought the largest telephone network in the Swedish capital, monopolized the capital market, and made his phones with nowhere to sell, but to the outskirts of the city and other countries. By mistake, Ericsson had not yet done business in the local area, and had first become a company doing export trade.
Although the introductory technology is "borrowed", as a craftsman, Las Magnus Ericsson is very obsessed with technology. In order to ensure the normal use of the phone, Ericsson immediately began to study how to make multiple phones connected at the same time, and soon made a multi-exchange desk hand-cranked engine. This obsession with technology has won Ericsson a lot of markets.
In 1892, Ericsson became the first foreign communications company to enter China, providing China with 2,000 telephones that resembled coffee grinders. Soon, Norway and Russia also used Ericsson's telephone. Even in Sweden, there are telecommunications companies that think that bell is too expensive, and they have cooperated with Ericsson to rebuild a telephone network.
Made an instrument, but also made a telephone of Las Magnus Ericsson
By the time Ericsson entered the 20th century, the company had more than 1,000 employees worldwide and produced 50,000 telephones, making it one of the world's largest telecommunications companies. In 1916, Ericsson erected a switchboard in the freezing climate of Moscow that could connect 60,000 telephones at the same time, which is unique in history. In this technical contrast, the former big brother Bell Company is eclipsed.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, countless businesses were in crisis or even bankruptcy as a result of the two world wars, but amazingly, Ericsson was not only unscathed, but even after the end of the war, communication orders rolled in without marketing.
There are two reasons for this strange phenomenon, one is that Sweden, as a neutral country, has been unscathed in the war, and the other is that Ericsson is not only famous for its technical reputation, but also for its criteria for selecting customers. An Ericsson executive once lamented, "We only seem to have 76 customers, but these customers are all countries." As a company providing basic telecommunications services, Ericsson has grasped big customers, and when these countries get rid of war and rebuild their homes, they naturally receive countless orders.
Early Ericsson operator
However, Ericsson, which has been on the smooth ride since its inception, has hit a nail in the coffin with its Nordic neighbors.
In 1973, Motorola introduced the dyna TAC, the world's first portable mobile phone prototype, which weighed about a kilogram, equivalent to half a brick. The power of this half of the brick is not only in self-defense, but also in breaking the original indoor and vehicle portable phone market, and building a completely different wireless communication market.
Twelve years later, Motorola launched its first commercial portable mobile phone, the Motorola Dyna TAC 8000 X, priced at $3,995 and at the expense of communications. Nokia from Finland was impressed, and in 1992, it launched its first mass-produced GSM mobile phone, the Nokia 1011.
In contrast, although Ericsson has launched the GSM mobile phone a year in advance, this innovation seems to be "innovative for the sake of innovation", and the whole company is still concerned about the telephone system, this GSM mobile phone is like a self-certification certificate, pasted on the façade, proudly turning away the GSM mobile phone commercial opportunity.
From 1991 to 2000, the number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide soared from 62 million to 402 million. By the time Ericsson was finally willing to split its energy into the mobile phone market, Nokia had used a clear and watery straight phone to attack everywhere in the global market.
This time, Nokia's target is not the European continent in its hometown, nor the United States, the home base of Motorola, but the Chinese market that Ericsson has marked 100 years ago. Nokia is not willing to confront Ericsson head-on, and unlike Ericsson, which likes to grasp big customers, Nokia takes the "mass line", from the pragmatic masses in Finland to the masses in China who are eager for a new era.
Before the bells of the new century rang, China's mobile phone market was chasing deer, and Nokia, which insisted on style, and Ericsson, hesitated to fight a three-way scuffle, and Huaqiang North and a dry domestic mobile phone brand quietly rose. In just a few years, the price of mobile phones has been cut by the waist, and the price of popular mobile phones has dropped by as much as 4,000 yuan.
In 1998, when the smoke cleared and China became the world's third-largest mobile phone country after the United States and Japan, Nokia won the talisman of the Chinese market and entered the peak of the world's first sales for 14 years.
At this time, Ericsson, although it won a part of the market share of 3G mobile communication systems, but the mobile phone market share fell from 18% to 5%, hesitated, and lost the opportunity to become a mobile phone giant.
The story of Ericsson and Nokia is the epitome of the five Nordic countries falling in love and killing each other
In the first 10 years of the 21st century, the status of Ericsson and Nokia has been reversed several times.
Nokia was originally on the verge of bankruptcy in 1990, but because of a desperate bet on the mobile phone market and turned over, correspondingly, Ericsson lost the opportunity of the mobile phone market, had to partner with Sony to establish the Sony Ericsson brand to kill back to the mobile phone market. On the other hand, the global IT bubble burst, the communications industry slid into a trough, and Ericsson's proud traditional business was also in trouble.
But soon, Apple launched the iphone 3G, the IOS 2x version officially provided a global language, followed by Google, launched the open source system Android, opening the era of smart phones to encircle the feature phone. Again, this is a challenge from outsiders. Although Ericsson has earlier come up with the originator of the smartphone, the Ericsson R380 that can run the Saipan system, but like the previous challenge of the feature machine, Ericsson once again failed because of hesitation.
In 2012, Ericsson sold all of its shares in the Sony-Ericsson brand to Sony, completely exiting the mobile phone market and focusing on 3G and 4G LTE network operation services. Also in this year, Nokia lost the honor of the first global mobile phone market share, and the fall of the building was only in a flash.
Compared with the hesitation in the face of new products, Ericsson's enthusiasm for technology is as good as ever. Despite its defeat in the mobile phone market, Ericsson still has 40% of the global 3G WCDMA market share, and Ericsson is also one of the main developers in the development of 4G LTE standards.
In 2007, Erdal Arıkan, a professor of mathematics in Turkey, published a paper mentioning the technical sources of 5G, and since then, major communications equipment manufacturers have tried their best to run to the forefront of the world. Ericsson is no different, in 2014, Ericsson took the lead in launching the world's first 5G mobile terminal prototype. In 2017, Ericsson launched its own 5G platform.
So far, of the 35 5G commercial networks that have been put into operation in the world, Ericsson has provided equipment for 21 of them, including cooperation with Korea Telecom, the reduction of technical delays in production at the Fraunhofer Institute, and the application of the 2019 Amir Cup Football League in Qatar.
In June, Ericsson released a report saying that by the end of 2024, the number of global 5G subscribers will reach 1.9 billion, of which 35% of the traffic will be carried by 5G networks, and the technology will cover 65% of the world's population.
The trillion-level market of 5G has been rendered by the media for a long time, and like everyone's enthusiastic expectations, Ericsson also regards 5G as the top priority at present. Two missed opportunities in the past, this time, Ericsson learned to be obedient.
On September 17, Ericsson's 18-month-long mobile communications plant in Nanjing was put into operation. In the new plant, Ericsson installed the first modular 5G wireless automatic assembly line, as well as an automatic alarm system using cellular IoT technology, to show off its muscles in the "5G+AI+IoT" field.
Ericsson has "captured" the operators of various countries
Under such ambition, there is also the determination of Ericsson's desperate bet: in the second quarter of this year, Ericsson's revenue was 54.8 billion Swedish kronor (about 40.05 billion yuan), and its net profit was 1.8 billion Swedish kronor (about 1.32 billion yuan), which is a net loss of SEK 1.8 billion in the same period last year. From a net loss of 1.8 billion yuan to a net profit of 1.8 billion, it is not only the credit of large-scale layoffs and adjustment of the structure, but also the return on previous investments in the first year of 5G commercialization.
But Ericsson's test is far from over. In the global market, Ericsson's advantage is only North America, especially the United States, while in the vast European, Middle East and African markets, Ericsson's advantage is far less than Nokia, Huawei and ZTE.
In addition, due to its participation in the formulation of 4G standards, Ericsson's 5G technology inevitably has a path dependence on 4G, and pays more attention to the transition from 4G to 5G. Ericsson's 4G in China is at a disadvantage, and Ericsson's 5G market in China is inevitably limited compared to the local friends who have started a new stove in 5G technology.
The importance of 5G has been too much science, this high-speed, large-capacity, low-latency data transmission, not only to enable everyone cloud games, cloud video, more importantly, it activates the enterprise market, for the "AI + Internet of Things" provides a possibility.
As Ericsson himself introduced, at the Fraunhofer Institute, 5G can delay the manufacture of blades in jet engines by less than 1 millisecond, a difference of just that millisecond that could save 30 million to 40 million euros a year in the cost of defective products.
No matter how much Ericsson can grab a few points in this 5G feast, it is a well-deserved number one player in the previous century-long communications storm that has changed the entire world. From 1876 to 2019, from telegraph to telephone to mobile phone, Ericsson has experienced the development of the communications industry from 1G to 5G, and it is not so much Nokia's "shadow enemy" as it is the shadow rival of all current communication providers.
Taking history as a mirror, we can know the rise and fall, and sometimes look at the shadow, which can also make people have a sense of crisis that "there is nothing irreplaceable". Some people lack a breath, while some companies lack a sense of crisis.
Resources:
The World Network: A History of Mobile Communications
Lei Zhenzhou: The development trend of the global telecommunications industry
Tension: The beauty of communication
Beijing News: Without a price war, Ericsson still wants to seek China's 5G market share
Caixin: President of Ericsson China: The real challenge of 5G co-construction and sharing is in operation
IEEEInformation Theory Society：Biographies of New AEs
Newsweek.com：Battle Of The Nordic Giants
Ericsson.com：5 G ultra-low latencypropels jet engine manufacturing
Image from the web
The author of this article is | Mao Hongtao, and the editor-in-chief is Wang Tao|
Editor| Chen Runjiang Consultant | Wang Shuqi