Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson
Stockholm
Ericsson was founded in 1876 — the same year Alexander Graham Bell filed his telephone patent — by Lars Magnus Ericsson, who started with a telegraph repair shop in Stockholm and soon began building his own telephones. A century and a half later, the company is one of only three suppliers (with Huawei and Nokia) capable of building a national 5G network end to end.
The Swedish group's technology stack covers radio access, transport, and core networks, plus the software that runs them: its base stations are deployed by roughly 300 operators worldwide, and its cloud-native 5G core handles signaling for more than a billion subscribers. Ericsson also owns one of telecom's deepest patent portfolios, licensing essential 5G patents to most smartphone makers.
Headquartered in Stockholm with about 100,000 employees and annual sales near US$25 billion, Ericsson is currently reinventing itself again: the 2022 acquisition of Vonage gives it a platform for network APIs — letting app developers tap directly into operator networks — as it chases growth beyond hardware into software and services.
