Samsung’s 5G inroads on Huawei

Samsung is better known for its smartphones than its telecoms equipment, but both product lines could have equal billing in the new world of 5G.

While the South Korean tech conglomerate has been developing telecoms technology for more than 40 years, it has wrongly focused in the past on a series of wireless technologies that quickly became obsolete. Woojune Kim, the head of global sales at Samsung’s network business, told a UK parliamentary committee in July: “You could say that we placed our bet on the wrong horse.”

That has changed with 5G. As the chart shows, Samsung is second only to Huawei in 5G patents and the announcement last month of its biggest 5G deal to date — a $6.6bn five-year contract with US group Verizon — was seen as a potential game-changer by analysts.

With Huawei facing being shut out of many markets, Samsung is joining Nokia and Ericsson in taking advantage, and our analysis records that outside South Korea, where it is the biggest player in 5G network equipment, it has also won deals in the US with Sprint, AT&T and US Cellular, with KDDI in Japan, Telus and Videotron in Canada and Spark in New Zealand. Financial Times