- Swedish mobile giant Ericsson has reported increased sales in the first quarter of this year. Sales for the company rose by 13% reaching SEK 53.5 (US$47.5) billion. Ericsson, however ended the quarter with a negative cash flow from operating activities of SEK -5.9 b. mainly due to a change in business mix with less capacity business in North America and a higher share of coverage business in Mainland China.
- With current visibility, Ericsson anticipates the fast pace of 4G deployments in Mainland China to continue and the North American mobile broadband business to remain slow in the short term as operators remained focused on cash flow optimization in order to finance major acquisitions and spectrum auctions. However, due to strong consumer demand and continued growth of mobile data traffic in North America, Ericsson expects further quality and capacity investments.
According to Ericsson, it is investing in a select targeted areas; IP networks, Cloud, OSS & BSS, TV & Media and Industry & Society as sales in these areas continued to show good growth. The company's key launches at the Mobile World Congress event held in March were related to the targeted areas, including the new Router 6000 Series, the Hyperscale Cloud Solution, Expert Analytics 15.0, a new Media Delivery Network solution and Digital Telco Transformation.The event, said Ericsson, also saw an increased interest from non-operator customers, especially within the area of Industry & Society.
