Peter Nyquist: Thanks, Börje. Thank you Francois, for those questions. So we’ll move further in the Q&A session. And we have the next question from Andreas Wilson at [indiscernible] Good morning, Andreas.
Unidentified Analyst: Good morning, everyone and thank you for taking my question. Just a follow-up on the overall market and maybe a little bit more long term. We all know 5G importance for society as such and so on. But why do you feel or what is your view on why especially the U.S. operators are a little bit more cautious now, what do they need to see in order to become a little bit more positive in putting investments into this? And secondly, on the AT&T contract, also more long term beyond 2024, how do you see that ramping up? And if you could say something about the visibility you have in that particular contract over time? Thanks.
Börje Ekholm: But if we start with the market without singling out any operators because they are our customers, we work very closely with them. But if you look at mobile infrastructure, what is a bit unique with the mobile infrastructure is that it’s not a cut-off point you have it or you don’t have it. It’s actually a degrading quality. And as that allows you, in a way, as an operator to pare back investments for a period of time, traffic continues to grow the underlying traffic growth, 20%, 30% faster, sometimes when you have fixed wireless access. So in a way, the capacity demand continues, then you can say, okay, I can degrade performance a bit. I can actually – I may not need the capacity short term so you can save investments.
But ultimately, you need the capacity. So what will then be the trigger for that? It will probably be competition offering a better service. It may be a front runner in the market that actually drives the others, therefore, to invest. It may be new type of use cases that come up that demands more bandwidth, whether that is XR applications, whether it’s new type of streaming services, new type of social media, I don’t know. But we know when you get those new type of use cases into the network, it actually drives the need to invest. And lastly, I would say, for the world to really benefit from 5G, we need to migrate to 5G stand-alone. And there are – if you look across the world, very few 5G stand-alone networks built out. Really, where it’s a front runner is China.
And in China, you start to see enterprise applications coming on top of the 5G network that we are not seeing in the rest of the world yet. For the simple reason, the infrastructure is not built out. So when you look at this, when will it exactly be? I don’t know, to be honest, it’s in the hands of the customers when they make the strategic decision to say, okay, we need this to offer the services to offer the capabilities to generate new type of revenues for the network. And I think that’s going to come. The ultimate recovery will come, but it’s just in the hands of the customers.
Peter Nyquist: And your second question around AT&T long term, how that will be developed?
Börje Ekholm: No, I think we will have to come back to that. We have signed the agreement. We are very pleased with that. And we are now starting to ramp up the preparation for that. It will be visible in the second half. But exactly how it plays out, I would probably rather report when it happens on that. But it’s a breakthrough contract. It’s historic in nature also from a strategic point of view. But we have – we can say we have great visibility that it’s going to take some time to ramp up the contract that’s going to happen, as Carl said, in the second half of this year. But then we have visibility on how that’s going to look like going forward. But let’s come back to that.
Peter Nyquist: Thanks, Börje and Carl.
Unidentified Analyst: Perfect. Thank you.
Peter Nyquist: And we lost him. We’ll move to the next question.
Börje Ekholm: Probably hang up.
Peter Nyquist: Good morning, [indiscernible] from Barclays. How are you today?
Unidentified Analyst: Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. And thank you, Carl, and Peter, best of luck to your future endeavors.
Peter Nyquist: Thank you.
Unidentified Analyst: I have a few questions, and I’ll go one at a time. And the first one is really on India. And what is your expected normalized revenue level in ’24 and going forward? And is it sensible to assume it goes back to, say, the 2022 level plus your market share gain with Jio [PH] for 5G? Or do you see some structural uplift in the overall market size? That’s my first question.
Börje Ekholm: Carl?
Carl Mellander: Yes, it’s, of course, in the hands of the operators, how much they invest. But I think it’s fair to assume that a normalized level is higher than pre 5G. 2023 was a record year, and it’s coming down, as we said, in 2024, but we would still expect a higher volume than the 2022 levels. Again, it’s up to operators how much they want to invest, obviously.
Peter Nyquist: And your second question, Josef?
Unidentified Analyst: Yes. The second question is about the ramp-up for AT&T. And shall we expect any revenue from AT&T in the first half of – at any kind of material level? And also just regarding that, do you need to really hire in North America to execute the contract? Because obviously, you had a savings program where you had a huge headcount reduction in North America last year. And do you need to hire some of those people back for the new contracts?
Carl Mellander: We will – we don’t expect material revenue in the first half. So that’s why we really point that out, that is to be expected in the second half. Resources, rehiring in North America elsewhere Börje, do you want to take that?
Börje Ekholm: We have also changed the structure. So we have less service engineers basically in house. So we will rely more on third party for that. So I don’t expect material re-hirings to deliver on this contract.
