Huawei sustains lead in global communications market by 31%

Huawei has maintained its leadership in the global wireless infrastructure market, increasing its market share by three per cent to 31 per cent.

Analysts at the Dell’Oro for telecommunications infrastructure disclosed this in a report cited by Financial Street on Sunday.

According to the analysts, the global wireless infrastructure market grew seven per cent in 2020, its fastest annual growth for a decade.

The group said Huawei grew despite the decisions by the United States, and governments of other countries, mostly in Europe, to force their local carriers to exclude the Chinese group.

Areas monitored included mobile core and radio access networks, broadband access; microwave and optical transport; SP router and carrier Ethernet switching, the researchers further stated.

Commenting on Huawei’s achievement, the Vice President and Lead Analyst at Dell’Oro, Stefan Pongratz, was quoted as saying that the rankings remained stable between 2019 and 2020, with Huawei leading the big seven.

These included Nokia, Ericsson, ZTE, Cisco, Ciena and Samsung, which accounted for between 80 per cent to 85 per cent of the whole market, Pongratz stated.

He hinted that the total telecom equipment revenue was put at between $90bn to $95bn with a roughly equal split between the wireless segments and fixed access.

Pongratz said revenue shares had continued to be impacted by the state of the 5G rollouts in highly concentrated markets.

“While both Ericsson and Nokia improved their RAN positions outside China, initial estimates suggest Huawei’s global telecom equipment market share, including China, improved by two to three percentage points for the full year 2020,” he added.

Huawei’s 31 per cent share more than doubled that of its rivals, Ericsson and Nokia combined, said the analysts who were optimistic about this year for telecoms gear, projecting the total global market will grow by between three per cent to five per cent.

The researchers also estimated that Huawei and ZTE collectively gained around three to four percentage points of revenue share between 2019 and 2020.

Huawei’s revenue share of the market, excluding China, however, fell by two per last year, from at some 20 per cent, the analysts.

The Chinese group also lost its briefly-held top position in smartphone sales last year, partly as a consequence of US sanctions on key components.

“Between concerns on starting new optical builds during the start of the pandemic and aggressive plans on 5G deployments that required a larger share of a service provider’s capital budget, the spending on optical transport dramatically slowed by the end of 2020,” said Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group.

“It was a really dramatic drop in optical equipment purchases in the fourth quarter. While we anticipated a slowdown near the end of the year due to concerns around COVID-19, we were surprised by a 29 per cent year-over-year decline in WDM purchases in North America as well as a 12 percent decline in China,” the analysts added.