Even though Nokia has struggled to compete with major players like Ericsson and Huawei over the past few years, the Finnish company is still a major player in the network infrastructure business. Samsung also has a Radio Access Network (RAN) branch of its own, but it is relatively small, with a reported market share of around 6.1% last year.
Industry insider rumors have now started to surface, indicating Samsung’s desire to purchase Nokia’s infrastructure business to strengthen its own RAN positions. An alleged figure of $10 billion for the sale has been tossed around. If the deal goes through, Samsung will effectively become the second-biggest RAN supplier worldwide, 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 worldwide, including Telus Canada, O2 in Germany, Reliance Jio in India, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Dish and Verizon in the US and Vodafone in the UK.