Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson

Is Ericsson publicly traded?
Yes. Ericsson trades on Nasdaq Stockholm in A and B share classes and on the Nasdaq exchange in New York under the ticker ERIC through American Depositary Shares. It has been listed for more than a century.

Who owns Ericsson?
Public shareholders own the company, with the largest voting bloc held by Investor AB, the Wallenberg family's investment vehicle, through the dual-class share structure. No single owner controls the company, but A shares carry ten votes versus one for B shares.

When was Ericsson founded?
The company was founded in 1876 in Stockholm by Lars Magnus Ericsson, making it 150 years old in 2026 and one of the oldest operating technology companies in the world.

What does Ericsson make?
Ericsson builds mobile network infrastructure: radio access equipment, core network software, and operations systems for carriers, plus enterprise products including Cradlepoint routers, private 5G networks, and Vonage communications APIs. It no longer makes consumer phones.

How many employees does Ericsson have?
Approximately 88,800 employees as of the end of 2025, down from about 94,300 in 2024 and nearly 100,000 in 2023, reflecting multi-year efficiency programs. A further 1,600 reductions in Sweden were proposed in 2026.

What was the Ericsson corruption scandal?
Between 2000 and 2016, Ericsson units paid bribes and falsified records in several countries. The company settled with US authorities in 2019 for over $1 billion, then paid $206.7 million more in 2023 for breaching the settlement's disclosure terms over Iraq payments.

How much revenue does Ericsson generate?
Net sales were SEK 236.7 billion in fiscal 2025, down from SEK 247.9 billion in 2024, with an adjusted EBITA of SEK 42.9 billion and net income of SEK 28.7 billion.

Lars Magnus Ericsson founded the company in 1876 as a Stockholm workshop repairing telegraph instruments. Born in 1846 in rural Värmland, he had trained as an instrument maker at the Swedish state telegraph company before striking out on his own at age 30. Within two years he was manufacturing telephones based on designs derived from the Bell patents, and his receivers, noted for quality, won orders against established German and British suppliers.

Exports drove early growth. By the 1890s Ericsson equipment operated across Scandinavia, Russia, and as far as China and Mexico. The company built factories abroad to satisfy local supply requirements, including major plants in Russia that were lost to nationalization after the 1917 revolution, a costly early lesson in geopolitical risk.

Through the mid-twentieth century Ericsson specialized in telephone switching. Its crossbar exchanges, developed with subsidiary Televerket cooperation, became a world standard, and the AXE digital switching system launched in the 1970s made Ericsson the world's largest supplier of digital telephone exchanges for a time.

Mobile telephony redefined the company. Ericsson co-developed the Nordic NMT system in the 1980s, then became a principal architect of GSM. Through the 1990s it supplied the majority of the world's GSM infrastructure and briefly stood among the largest mobile handset makers, before merging its phone business into Sony Ericsson in 2001 and selling out entirely in 2012.

The post-2010 period was harder. Competition from Huawei and a failed diversification into media and IT services produced losses and the 2017 appointment of Börje Ekholm, an Investor AB veteran, as CEO. Ekholm sold non-core units, refocused on radio access and core software, and restored margins. The $6.2 billion Vonage acquisition in 2022 added a cloud communications and network API business, and the 2024 formation of Aduna, a joint venture with a dozen global carriers, aims to sell network capabilities to developers.

In 2025 the company sold iconectiv to Koch Equity for about $1 billion, cut roughly 5,000 jobs amid a soft RAN market, and proposed a SEK 15 billion buyback plus a SEK 3.00 dividend for 2025. A further 1,600 job reductions in Sweden were proposed in early 2026.

Ericsson has been named to the Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators list multiple times, reflecting the scale and citation impact of its patent portfolio. Industry analysts consistently place it in the leader quadrant for 5G RAN and core network vendors in Gartner and Frost & Sullivan assessments.

The company has also appeared on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and CDP climate lists in past years, and it received Global Mobile Awards recognition at Mobile World Congress for network technology achievements.

Ericsson's defining compliance failure was resolved at the end of 2019, when it agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charges. The SEC and Department of Justice documented bribes and falsified records in Djibouti, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Kuwait spanning 2000 to 2016. The company entered a deferred prosecution agreement and accepted an independent compliance monitor.

The Iraq payments affair extended the story. Internal findings disclosed in 2022 showed that employees had made irregular payments in Iraq, and media reporting alleged some funds may have reached intermediaries tied to ISIS. The US Department of Justice ruled Ericsson had breached the deferred prosecution agreement by failing to disclose, and in March 2023 the company paid an additional $206.7 million penalty. Swedish shareholders subsequently declined to grant the CEO discharge from liability for 2021 at the 2022 annual meeting, a rare rebuke.

Geopolitical friction is an ongoing risk rather than a resolved matter. Ericsson operates in a sector shaped by US-China technology restrictions, faces periodic questions about China exposure in both directions, and announced plans in 2026 to reduce reliance on the US market as conditions shifted. Swedish media and unions have also criticized the scale of domestic job cuts.