While Nokia has struggled to compete with big players like Ericsson and Huawei in recent years, the Finnish company is still a major player in the network infrastructure business. Samsung also has its own Radio Access Network (RAN) business, but it is relatively small, with a reported market share of around 6.1% last year.
Now, rumors have surfaced from industry insiders that Samsung is looking to buy Nokia’s infrastructure business to bolster its own RAN positions. A reported $10 billion has been bandied about for the sale. If the deal goes through, Samsung will effectively become the world’s second-largest RAN vendor, with a 25.6% market share.
Samsung already makes 4G and 5G base stations, chipsets, devices, radios and core equipment, so it’s not like the Korean giant is new to the infrastructure business. It has already supplied carriers around the world, including Telus Canada, O2 in Germany, Reliance Jio in USA, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Dish and Verizon in the US, and Vodafone in the UK.