Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (publ) (NASDAQ:ERIC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Borje Ekholm: If I take the GMP and you take the India question Carl. So if you look at GMP, we actually started already in 2019, we customer trials of speed on demand. So that was really the trigger point when we could see the customer interest and we’re thinking about application developers here, both in the gaming side as well as in collaborative softwares. So, there was a great interest, we saw that. Of course to launch quality of service APIs, you need some network investments, we need a network exposure layer, et cetera. So it takes some time to get there. There are some other simpler network APIs that still rely on the network, but they can be presented over CPaaS. Those will be the first ones will come back to tell you, what we’re launching.

But we expect to see some early revenues this year, small in scale. We’re talking tens of millions of kroner this year. But they will start to grow into next year. Really to be meaningful, I think the fair thing is to expect that during 2025, in reality, because it will really need to get not only several operators involved. We need to get the industry and the developers to start using the APIs as well for this to scale. And it’s hard for them or actually impossible for them to use it before we’ve gotten the operator community signed on to a similar type of solution. We’re not going to be alone with our GMP, there are going to be other platforms as well, but we are at least the front runner. So we should be able to run as long as we can run fast, we are going to be rather attractive to sign up with, but we’ll face competition here as well.

But I’m convinced we can outgrow where we are today, but don’t expect this to be really meaningful until a ’25 timeframe.

Carl Mellander: Thank you, Janardan. Thanks for the India question. I’ll take that. So, I mean, I won’t comment on specific margin profiles in for different customers or for obvious reasons, but of course it’s our job to deliver customer value and make sure that we make decent margins out of that. And I think that that has been the case already. Now, the big rollout projects or the pace of rollout, I should say, will be coming down. Maybe more interesting fact is on the cash flow side because we tie up significant working capital because of the nature of this business with rollout, but that tide will turn as volumes come down. We will start to collect more and get a positive cash flow impact from that, so that we should see in 2024. Margin is an everyday job for us, of course, to make sure that we have the right margins and that we will continue with.

Peter Nyquist: So, we’ll move further in the queue here and we have the next question coming from the line of Sandeep Deshpande at JPMorgan.

Sandeep Deshpande: My question is on the margin going into ’24. I mean clearly, you seem to be seeing some positive impact from the restructuring in CSS and possibly in the networks business itself. If you say India is potentially flattish into Q4 and then potentially rolling off in 2024. U.S. should increase as the percentage of business as well as your restructuring should kick in. So theoretically, we should be assuming that your networks margin and your CSS margin should be improving in ’24. Is this the correct contention? And my second question is, are there any signs of any revival in demand in Europe? Europe has had very little 5G rollout. I mean they have invested very little this year as well compared to where India has invested, which is a much, historically a much further behind market compared to Europe. So what are you hearing from your European customers at this point and regard to ’24?

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