“It’s difficult to find a silver lining in the first quarter,” says Dell’Oro vp Stefan
Pongratz, “we’ve been monitoring the RAN market since the year 2000, and the contraction experienced in the first quarter marked the steepest decline in our entire history of covering this market. In addition to the known coverage related challenges that the market is dealing with when comps in the advanced 5G markets are becoming more challenging, there are now serious concerns about the timing of the capacity upgrades given current network utilization levels and data traffic growth rates,
The Middle East and Africa markets are growing, Latin America is stable, and the remaining regions, including North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific declined sharply in 1Q 2024.
Vendor rankings remain stable while vendor shares are shifting. In the first quarter, Huawei’s 4QT (four quarter trailing) revenue share improved relative to 2023 while Nokia lost some ground over the same period.
The top 5 RAN suppliers based on worldwide revenues are Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE, and Samsung.
Growth projections have been revised slightly downward over the short term. Global RAN is now projected to decline 5 to 8% in 2024.
