Ericsson remains upbeat about demand for services as it pursues talks over a deal to manage Vodafone's network in the Netherlands, a senior executive said.
As well as being a vendor of equipment for mobile phone networks, Ericsson also offers services such as deploying and managing networks and systems integration.
The services sector has been high profile lately for the company after it signed deals to run the networks of Hutchison Whampoa's mobile companies in Britain and Italy operating under the name 3, which Ericsson has said are some of its biggest contracts. Hans Vestberg, head of the service business at Ericsson, said operators were turning to vendors due to the pressure to cut costs as well as demands from new technology. He said Ericsson was the biggest in the market for services with a share of between 9 and 10 percent, but he declined to give a forecast for how this could develop.
"We are in a good position to grow due to our size and experience within services," he told Reuters in an interview on March 29.
Growth in the service market tends to follow that in the telecom equipment market, although Ericsson may grow faster than the market as a whole, he added.
On Vodafone, Vestberg said Ericsson last year signed a memorandum of understanding for a possible managed services agreement with the Dutch unit of the mobile giant but that talks were still going on. Any deal with the Dutch unit of Vodafone would be worth less than those for 3 in Italy, worth around 15 billion Swedish crowns ($1.9 billion) and in Britain, which one analyst estimated could be worth 30 billion crowns. But it would have symbolic meaning.
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