While Nokia has struggled to compete with major 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) arm, but it is relatively small, with a reported market share of around 6.1% last year.
Rumors from industry insiders have begun to surface indicating Samsung’s desire to buy Nokia’s infrastructure business to strengthen its own RAN positions. A reported $10 billion valuation for the sale has been floated. If the deal goes through, Samsung would 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 India, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Dish and Verizon in the US and Vodafone in the UK.