Who Owns Ericsson?

Lars Magnus Ericsson, a former telegraph instrument maker, opened a repair workshop for telegraph equipment in Stockholm in 1876. He quickly moved into manufacturing telephones, and by the 1890s Ericsson was exporting telephone sets and exchanges across Europe and into Asia and Latin America.

Through the early twentieth century the company built national telephone networks and supplied automatic exchange equipment. Its crossbar switching systems, developed mid-century, became a global standard. Ericsson's AXE digital exchange, launched in the 1970s, was one of the world's first fully digital switching systems and powered telephone networks in more than 100 countries.

The mobile era transformed the company. Ericsson was central to the Nordic NMT standard, then to GSM, the European second-generation standard that became the world's dominant mobile technology. It supplied much of the infrastructure for the global GSM rollout of the 1990s and became one of the three leading mobile infrastructure vendors alongside Nokia and Motorola.

In 2001, Ericsson merged its mobile phone handset business with Sony's to form Sony Ericsson, exiting handsets entirely when it sold its stake to Sony in 2012 to focus on network infrastructure. The company then rode successive generations of mobile technology, supplying equipment for 3G, 4G, and 5G rollouts on every continent.

Under CEO Börje Ekholm from 2017, Ericsson refocused on its core radio access network and core software businesses after a period of losses, divesting media and IT assets. It acquired US cloud communications firm Vonage for $6.2 billion in 2022 to build an enterprise API business. In 2025 it sold iconectiv, its number-portability and identity subsidiary, to Koch Equity for about $1 billion, booked the gain in an adjusted EBITA of SEK 42.9 billion, and reported net sales of SEK 236.7 billion. By year-end 2025, Ericsson equipment powered 206 live 5G networks in 85 countries, carrying roughly half of all mobile traffic outside China.