Ericsson

Thank you, Jerry. Good morning, everyone, or good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this call today, the Q3 report. With me here today, I have our President and CEO, Börje Ekholm, and our CFO, Carl Melander. Before starting, I would like to read the following. During the call today, we will be making forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our current expectations and certain planning assumptions, which are subject to risk and uncertainties. The actual result may differ in material due to factors mentioned in today's press release and discussed in this conference call. We encourage you to read about these risks and uncertainties in our earnings report as well as in our annual report. With that said, I would like to hand over the call to you, Birger. Please, Birger.

Thank you, Peter, and welcome everyone to this call for our third quarter results. We are continuing to execute on our focus strategy and we see increasing evidence that our strategy is working and it's reinforced by the reported performance for the third quarter. We're leading in 5G and that's through our significant investment in R&D that's driving our global technology leadership and really enabling us to provide a cost and performance benefits to our customers. Our investments in technology leadership has also allowed us to continue to gain market share. And it's worth mentioning that most of these gains come from non-Chinese competitors. So we're not winning here due to geopolitical situation. It's all about winning in front of the customer and delivering the best portfolio and cost competitive portfolio they can choose. We're also seeing that we're making progress on winning in China and we have already announced that in the second quarter and that is a result of our increased efforts in R&D. It is very important for us and strategically important for us to be in China and that's because that's a global powerhouse for innovation and technological change and driven by many great entrepreneurs. We see this in many sectors and I'm personally involved in Alibaba and I've seen that innovative power firsthand over many, many years. No doubt China has massive scale, but I think the entrepreneurial spirit we see there is a key driver of their success in the world today. 5G is being built out very fast in China with good coverage. 4G drove the consumer app economy. And China, the US, and the Nordics, they were the first countries to roll out 4G. And that allowed entrepreneurs in those regions actually to innovate on top of the network, building what has become the app economy. So it's no surprise that we see the, call it the consumer app economy today, dominated by Chinese and American companies. Now we're seeing the same thing on 5G. So building out 5G will allow Chinese entrepreneurs as well as American and whoever is first on building the network to innovate in this new space. And I do think here it's actually important for the rest of the world, notably Europe, to take some impressions here from the fast build-out pace we're seeing in China. This will lead to, in a way, new companies being developed by entrepreneurs and innovators. And for us to be part of seeing the emergence of that ecosystem and realizing what will that drive for future requirements in the future will be critical. We see 5G as a huge opportunity for more, call it open and global innovation. And it's built on this requirement of a high performance, secure wireless network infrastructure. And the value of running applications on top of the 5G network will be significantly higher and it will be very similar to what we saw in 4G. So we see in reality 4G was a consumer drive and 5G will now be the backbone for digitalizing the enterprises. And that's what you see us also do. We continue to work with our service provider customers. But we're also going to build a material business for enterprise use cases. And that's to help the service providers drive more revenue growth. And that would ultimately drive more requirements and more benefit for us and network equipment. We already have a couple of offerings, IoT Accelerator being one, dedicated networks. But during the quarter, we announced a strategically important acquisition of Cradlepoint, which will allow us to build a position in wireless WAN as well. We look at some of the highlights in the third quarter specifically. We see 5G deployments around the world gaining pace, and it's now clearly the fastest scaling generation of mobile technology ever. We have 113 commercial contracts, 65 live networks, establishing ourselves as a clear leader in 5G. During the quarter, we had an organic growth of 7% year over year, and that's despite the challenges we get from COVID-19. Gross margin reached 43.2%, excluding restructuring, and its improvements across all business segments. Our operating margin was 15.6%, excluding restructuring costs, one of the highest for a long period of time. Our growth in China is particularly strong and our 5G contracts are following the plan we have discussed earlier. So now the contracts or our business there are contributing to our profits in the third quarter. As I said earlier, strengthening our position in China is critical for our long-term competitiveness. We have over the past few years worked a lot on our cash flow or ability to generate free cash flow. If we look on a rolling four-quarter basis, excluding our payment to DOJ and SEC, our free cash flow before M&A was 17.7 billion Swedish kronor. We have also announced the plans to acquire Cradlepoint earlier in September, and that is one key building block for our enterprise ambitions. And we expect to be able to close that deal in the next coming weeks. So if we look now at the end of the third quarter, the four-quarter rolling margin is 10.4%, which is above our target for 2020. So we feel increasing confidence of our ability to deliver on the financial target for the full year 2020. So let's move into the market overview. We see strong positive growth in Northeast Asia, driven by gains in 5G in China. In Southeast Asia, we also saw good growth, and that's several markets contributing, most notably Australia and Indonesia. We continue to see strong momentum in North America driven by the acceleration in 5G. Of course, the consolidation in the operator market did somewhat lower sales in managed services. as well as the legacy portfolio in digital services partly offset that growth. Europe and Latin America, that's a bit of a mixed picture. There we see good growth in Europe on the back of market share gains. And today you also saw that we announced a five-year strategic partnership with Telia in our whole market that is important given our significant R&D presence in Sweden. But the progress in Europe, that was actually offset by slower sales in Latin America. And that's really driven by uncertainty related to COVID-19 and lower operator revenue leading to lower operator capex. We saw a marginal drop in or marginal reduction in the sales volume in Middle East and Africa. That's also a mixed picture. 5G grew at a good pace in Middle East. But again, economic uncertainty from the pandemic delayed investment decisions in some African markets. But overall, we continue to progress. And if we move over to our segments in more detail, you'll see that networks performed very strongly with organic growth of 13%. That's underpinned by strong growth in China, as well as clearly North America. Operating margin reached 22.7%, driven by a larger share of software sales. We continue to execute on the turnaround plan for digital services, and the team is delivering well on all our plans, which includes the importance of increasing software sales. So the best way to assess the progress on our turnaround plan is to look at the improvements in gross margin. And there we reached 43.5% in the third quarter. At the same time, we're challenged by a legacy portfolio where sales are falling faster than we previously anticipated. In order to combat this, we had increased our investments in the new cloud-native 5G portfolio. And we are seeing good win ratio on our new portfolio. But it's also fair to say it has not yet generated any significant sales, and therefore it can simply not compensate for the fall in the legacy portfolio. On the wins that we have over the last six to nine months, it will not be recognized until 2021 in sales and beyond that, by the way. So whilst we still aim for a break-even in 2021, we recognize that that can be... be a bit of a challenge given where we are today. In managed services, sales were down 9% organically. That's primarily due to lower variable volumes in North America. At the same time, gross margin improved to 20.1%. And investments in R&D continue to drive new solutions and new automations that will actually have the potential to generate a much better margin profile in the future. And finally, in emerging business, we saw growth in sales and gross margin, supported by both volumes as well as cost efficiencies. But the most important part for emerging business this quarter was actually the announcement of cradle point that we expect to close in the coming few weeks. With that, Carl, I give the word to you. Thank you, Birger. And good morning, good afternoon, everyone. So let's dive into the P&L to start with here. Net sales then reached 57.5 billion. This represents an organic and FX-adjusted growth of 7% over Q3 2019. Really driven by networks that grew 13% based on the continued high demand for our 5G portfolio. And in particular, we grew in Northeast Asia with 49% FX-adjusted, as Birger showed earlier. but also North America, Europe and Australia to mention a few growth areas. Growth margin then you see 43.2. This is an improvement of by 540 basis points year over year, excluding restructuring here as well. And of course, encouraging to see that all segments improved year over year with the main contribution coming from networks, but also digital services where we in both cases saw increased software sales. Operating income came out at the 9 billion excluding restructuring charges and this is an improvement by 38% year-over-year if we exclude a couple of items that affect comparability in Q3 2019 and You can see here namely the provision for the SEC DOJ fines, of course, but also positive refined of Social Security cost last year so this 9 billion of operating income leads to an operating margin of 15.6 and where again, networks is the main driver with its 22.7 operating margin, as Börje showed earlier here. Free cash flow before M&A, 3.9 billion versus 4.5, but here we should also remember that we have absorbed in the 3.9 a 2 billion capital injection into the Swedish pension trust. So adjusted for that, we would have been at 5.9 billion. And then looking at the graphs in the bottom to illustrate what Burri mentioned, you see that the adjusted operating margin after, well, looking back four quarters rolling is 10.4, well in line with the financial target for 2020 of more than 10%. So let's have a closer look at gross margin if we take the next one here. And you see that on the rolling four quarter basis, gross margin is now 39.6%. And this means that we are now for the first time, if we look rolling then, above the target range of 37% to 39% for 2020. And we have seen, as you see here, a steady improvement of the gross margin over 10 consecutive quarters now in terms of rolling since the start of 2018. And as we have said many times, the driver behind this is, of course, the investments we make in R&D. And this clearly demonstrates that. the value creation logic that we have adopted since the strategic reorientation back in 2017. That investment in R&D to reach technology leadership creates competitiveness, and it has helped us win deals with technologically very demanding customers, but it also improves the gross margin, as we can see here. So to repeat a little bit, we saw improvement in gross margin in all segments, Software sales supported a higher margin in networks. Digital services also benefited from a higher share of software. And in addition to that, we had in this quarter very limited impact from the critical contracts that we've had impact earlier. For example, in Q3 2019, where we had a negative impact from those. In managed services, we saw continued efficiency gains contributing to better gross margin also there. And lastly, then emerging business and other, we've seen gross margin improving from 20 and a half to 30 and a half percent year over year driven by the new and emerging business part of that segment. And sequentially, you could say the main reason actually for the improvement is China. While Q2 this year was impacted by negative margins and also a rise down in China, as we communicated before, Now China turned out profitable now in Q3 and will improve further. So let's look at SDNA and R&D. And here we see R&D then landed at 9.9. This is an increase by half a billion, mainly following higher investment in networks in 5G. But of course now the numbers also include the acquired antenna business, which was not there a year ago. In digital services, we also transition R&D funds from the legacy to the new portfolio, where we invest to capture the business opportunities that we now see and that we now can capture with our 5G and cloud-native products, not least the 5G core area. In managed services, the strategies continues to be to invest in automation, analytics, AI to sharpen the offerings, So that's about R&D. And then on the FD&A side, you see we came up at 6 billion. And if we compare with last year, we recorded 4.9, but that included the item I mentioned before, a positive refund of social costs in Sweden of 0.9 billion. So if you adjust for this, it increases 0.2 billion year over year. And As we have said earlier, we are investing in digitalization and compliance in our company. And again, of course, we have incorporated the acquired antenna business during the year as well. We move over to cash flow and the financial position. And here in the third quarter, we delivered, as you see, a positive free cash flow before M&A of 3.9. And two items to remember here when we compare with last year. One, again, the $2 billion pension investment. trust capital injection and this by the way completes the 3 billion injection that we have mentioned in previous reports as well. And the second item is again the social security cost refund in Q3 2019 which had a 0.4 billion positive impact on cash flow. So if we adjust for those two items the free cash flow before M&A actually improved by 1.9 billion year-over-year. What you also see here is that net operating assets and liabilities had a negative 4.4 billion in the quarter. And this is partly driven by higher inventories following an active decision we have made to de-risk the supply chain here to create improved resilience when it comes to the component supply. But of course, we continue very high focus on working capital in the companies. So this leads to a cash position that was further strengthened. You can see the number here, 41.5 billion in net cash at the end of third quarter and gross cash now at 78.2 billion, also increased since last year. And as we mentioned earlier, on the rolling four-quarter basis, free cash flow before M&A amounts then to 17.7 billion if you exclude the DOJ SSC fines. And that translates into 7.7% of rolling four-quarter sales. So one could say that the efforts to create a strong cash flow here in the companies is bearing fruit. Okay, I will round off with a few words on the planning assumptions. First of all, again, as usual, please refer to the full report, page five, I believe. But just a few comments. First on the markets that we operate in. Deloro now expects the run market to grow by 8% in 2020, which is an increase from the previous number, 4%. With China then as the main growth engine at 33% growth. And the rest of the world, excluding China, then is flat in 2020. And remember, that includes the 4% growth in North America. Secondly, based on where we stand now, year-to-date and outlooks, We are strengthened in our confidence that we will reach the full year targets for the group. But again, as Bury has mentioned, an individual services due to the weaker sales, but also our added or accelerated R&D investments, we see a risk of further delay in reaching the 2020 target, as mentioned here before. And then some specifics to close off then. First of all, Q4 is... normally our strongest sales quarter. If we look back historically the last three years, the normal seasonality has been plus 70% on top line from Q3 to Q4. Then importantly, I think software sales and the software share of total sales in networks is expected now to be lower in the fourth quarter after a very favorable Q3. And historically also the share of services actually increases in Q4 compared to Q3 as we close off projects. OPEX increase normally Q3 to Q4 and looking at the last three years there's been an increase of 3 billion on average but with large variations between the years. Then finally just please note that cradle point is likely to close now and on closing then we will pay the consideration here to the sellers it's around 1 billion subject to adjustments for working capital and net debt, etc. And we will finance that with cash at hand. And then we will consolidate the cradle point financials in the Ericsson books in the segment Emerging Business and Other with a certain negative impact on the fourth quarter. And with that, thank you. And I hand back to you, Börje. Thanks, Karl. So in summary, we see the third quarter as another solid stepping stone for And we are well positioned now to take the next steps. We're leading in 5G with 113 agreements in place and 65 live networks around the world. We see a clear link between our earnings performance and the financial performance of the company and actually our continued investments in R&D towards technology leadership. We continue to increase our market share. You know, that's a very important part to keep scale in our business, but we're also doing that and maintaining a good cost control. With a strong cash flow that we've been able to generate and a very stable cash flow, we're now in a financially strong position to take the next steps and we can do that in strategic growth investments. And that's where we see a big opportunity going forward is in the enterprise segment. We think that will help drive the demand for network equipment and it will drive demand for or traffic into the operators network. That's going to benefit us. But we also look for standalone opportunities in there with good economics like cradle point acquisition. That we think is a typical example of the type of use cases that we will focus on that both drive traffic as well as a good standalone economics. So with the results we've delivered so far in the year and with Q3, we are confident about our ability to deliver on the group financial targets for the full year 2020. So with that, thank you. Give the word over to Peter.

Thank you, Burya. Then, operators, I would appreciate if you could open up the Q&A session.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press 01 on your push-button phone. If you would like to decline from the polling process, please press 02. As always, please limit yourself to one question at a time, and please keep your questions at a broad level. Detailed information is provided in the report, and Ericsson's Investor Relations and Media Relations team will be happy to take additional questions and discuss further details with you after the call. Our first question comes from the line of Alexander Duval of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, Ericsson. Good morning and many thanks for the question and congrats on strong results. First question, just about North America, there's obviously been discussion about spectrum auctions and you talked about good momentum there. I wondered if you could talk a bit about what that means for the first half of next year and just particularly interested given that tends to be a strong gross margin region and as part of that, how you're thinking about the importance of these iPhone launches on 5G. And then second question, you talked about winning market share in Europe, and it's quite impressive. You've grown there despite a declining market. And you have in the past talked about product advantages like dynamic spectrum sharing and the modularity of your product. So I wondered if you could give an update on the latest state of play there. You talked about sort of broad share gains versus various players. So I wondered if you could talk about what kind of product lead you think you have now versus, let's say, six to 12 months ago. Many thanks.

Thanks for your question. If we start with the North American one, we see the momentum continue into next year and the demand being strong. But I would also say one more thing when you think about the gross margin profile. we've been working quite a lot over the last few years to reduce those type of singular exposures that you referred to. So what you see now is a much more balanced gross margin profile across the company than we've had before. And you see our growth in China this quarter, and we still have a very high gross margin development. So You have to look at it as we're a little bit de-risked on the geographical mix a bit. But we see the growth continuing in North America into next year on the back of the spectrum auctions. And here I would also say that we believe that the launch of an Apple 5G phone will actually be important to show the value of 5G for the consumers. So we think that is going to help the demand for network equipment going forward, I would say. Without getting into too many details, what we see is the investments we started making already in 2017, and actually to some extent already before that, of making our portfolio 5G ready, enabling... the launch of 5G with software upgrades has put us in a fairly unique position. That's why we have been able to launch the dynamic spectrum sharing that have clearly helped our customers to get the coverage of 5G. It's always very speculative to say how many months or you're ahead. What we need to do, we need to continue to invest in R&D to keep the distance we have. So we're going to run as fast as we can providing our customers with new features and new functionalities that would allow them to drive their own revenue growth. And we feel that the path we're on here is what you see in Q3. It is a result of, you know, we gain the share as a result of our investments in R&D, and we'll continue to stick to that.

Thanks. Are you good with that, Alex? Many thanks. Okay. We'll move to the next question.

Our next question comes from the line of Alexander Perturk of Societe Generale. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Alexander. Yes, good morning. Good morning, all, and congratulations on a great quarter. Could you come back a little bit on the higher software content that you saw in networks and digital services in the quarter? Could you be more specific as to which regions benefited the most and why this phasing happened? And then more generally on this software content, this is now the second quarter this year we had a pretty positive development in this front. And would you say that we're moving into a world where this software content is structurally higher and this will drive your growth margins to structurally higher levels than what we've seen in the past few years? Thanks.

I can start at least and you can compliment Börje. But to start with, we're not talking about specific geographies here. It's more when we look at the mix between software, hardware and services that we see that the share of software was very strong in the quarter. And as you see in planning assumptions, we say that that ratio will most likely change in the fourth quarter with software coming down and services coming up. But we haven't disclosed anything around the specific geographies at all. I don't know, Barry, if you want to comment on the structural mix, but I wouldn't say that there is a structural change in that mix. Of course, we are a big software house in our ecosystem. Software is a big part. It's about 20-21% perhaps on average of our revenues. And when it comes to digital services, as one example, of course, one of the things we are driving, pursuing with customers is to get into more of a recurring software setup, which is good for stability in that business as well. But a big structural change, I would not say so, unless you want to compliment him. No, I think it is as part of the strategy, for example, in digital services, it is a clear ambition to actually increase our software share. So you should expect to see that go up and that's what we see in recurring revenues as well as software revenues. So there is an element of don't exaggerate the structure and it's not going to happen in an isolated quarter. But that's been one of the areas that we have focused on to prioritize. So we see that happening slowly but surely. That's of course one of the reasons why you have a good gross margin development But I think you should also remember software sales in our business tend to be a bit lumpy. So it comes in individual quarters, not in others. So there is an element of that as well. But we think the industry will be more of a software industry longer term. So that's critical for us to position ourselves in that. Great. Thanks, Börje.

Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll move to the next question. Yeah, thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Pedrag Savinovic of Carnegie.

Please go ahead. Hello, Pedrag.

Hello. Good morning to all. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I was wondering if you could share some flavor on the IPR revenues and their progression in the coming years. I understand that there are contracts, of course, under negotiation, but surely your expectancy for higher figures in the coming two years is given your position in 5G and critical patents. And my second question is regarding your closing remark there, Bodhia, on 5G for enterprise. With Cradlepoint now in the portfolio, you will have a more comprehensive offering for enterprise, but is it enough or do you see more opportunities for M&A or organic investments in other areas to have a more full-stack offering for enterprise customers?

Thank you. Two good questions. The first one on IPR, you saw that we were a bit lower in Q3 than we were in Q2. It is actually one of our licenses having lower sales volume that results in lower royalty revenues for us. That we have seen. If you look going forward, I think you should think of it as a It's a question of MPV of a contract. In every contract negotiation, it is actually a discussion about that total MPV value. And of course, what we are saying here is when we are in the middle of those discussions, we can have some temporary gaps in revenues. But we are going to accept those in order to get the fair value on our IPR agreements. So we are determined to make sure that we protect the value we have made in, or protect the investments we have made in R&D in the contract terms we can realize with the licensors. So we are going to be fighting hard for that, but we also say that could be gaps. So that's the way you should think of it, to maximize the NPV of the contract we can have trade-offs or gaps in revenues. If you look specifically on the 5G portfolio, we feel it's always hard to discuss the patent portfolio and how it compares. But we see with independent assessments done by truly independent firms that have looked at the criticality of our IPR or our patents, they see that we are clearly ahead of our competitors on the strength of the portfolio. And that's what we are going to leverage in those discussions. So that's a very important part going forward. It's clearly a key contributor to our earnings as well. But it's the strength of our patent portfolio and R&D that drives that. The second question... The enterprise... Yeah, you know, the reality is cradle point is one use case, wireless one. Still very low penetration and still mostly used for, I would say, a backup connectivity. We think with 5G, wireless one can gain a much more significant penetration and be used also as the primary connection point. So we see that as a very good long-term growth opportunity, a very exciting opportunity that's going to help Our customers generate more revenues and we have a standalone business opportunity that's attractive. But you're absolutely right. We think there are going to be a lot of other use cases where we will continue to invest. So that will include both organic as well as inorganic growth. But we will be building up a presence with kind of the two thought parameters or two criterias to remain the same. It has to help our customers generate revenues, and it has to be a standalone attractive opportunity. And here we have the IoT accelerator as well as dedicated networks today, but we have other organic opportunities that we pursue in parallel. So we are very excited about this area that we see that to contribute to our long-term revenue growth in a substantial way, Going forward, but we'll talk more about this at the capital markets day Thanks for you Peter you're happy without you Very happy.

Thank you very much.

Thank you We will move to the next question please operator.

Our next question comes from the line of actual Sultania of Credit Suisse.

Please go ahead Morning, I shall Hi morning Peter morning boy. Yeah, just on China just want to understand I guess you've seen very strong momentum in China driven by these 5G contracts. My understanding is that some of these contracts, the phase one is getting close to completion. We'll probably have phase two at some point. But how should we think about timing of phase two so far? Have you got any indication from your customers? And how should we think about sustainability of that revenue strength in China going into Q4 and into next year? And then attached to that, you mentioned that China has become profitable in this quarter. Can you just help us understand at a very high level as to what are the things going on in those contracts which has allowed you to become profitable from Q2 to Q3? And further, you're saying profitability should further increase So is it all about mix? Is it more about scale? What are the key drivers for further profitability improvement in China? Thank you.

Thank you. First of all, if we start with the profitability on the Chinese contract, we already said in Q2 when we announced that they're challenged in the beginning that they would actually contribute earnings in the second half of the year. So this is very much in line with the plan we put in place. So we're just following that. And it has to do with, you know, when you do a swap contract or a contract to build out, you're cost heavy in the beginning. That's what we saw. And now as we move into more of a, where you kind of have, you have some costs, of course, you will have that during the build out phase. But the reality is we're getting more revenues now. So that's the simple answer. You could have done this by bookkeeping and balancing costs, etc. But we think it's better to take the costs when they occur and take the revenues when they occur. And that's what you see. So you see that a bit of a mismatch in the numbers. But that's also why we feel very comfortable about the development for the rest of the year on those contracts. They will further improve in Q4. If you look otherwise, we don't see... they build out to stop in China. They will continue to build out, and they will continue to build out on the spectrum bands that we have awarded contracts now. But of course, over time, they will award other spectrum bands as well with contracts. And we'll have to compete there to seek to win there as well, and we will do so. But we see a good demand in China, and we have no reason to think that it will not continue.

Thank you, Borya.

And by the way, I think it's important, and this one you may think about in a more of a European context, which is that the 5G, if you think about the strategy that the Chinese operators are deploying, it's actually to build out the network because it is a platform for innovation. And it's a platform for driving the rest of the economy. And we in Europe tend to focus more on the investments in 5G, but the reality is the value of the applications you're going to run on top of 5G is much higher. And I think that's where the Chinese operators are recognizing that, and the Chinese system is recognizing that, actually incenting or driving more investments to build out the network infrastructure. We see almost the opposite in Europe.

Good, thanks. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Hachal. We'll move on to the next question operator.

Our next question comes from the line of Francois Bouveny of UBS. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Francois. Good morning, everyone. I have one quick question. You talked about the market share gain across different regions. So even if China is good, you mentioned that you gain market share in Europe and North America, for example. Do you think, I mean, given that you have, you know, relatively high market share in those regions, in Europe and North America compared to China, do you think there is a limit to the share? I mean, you can gain in a way that your customers as well want to maintain some balance within their, you know, suppliers. So I was just wondering if you think, you know, that maybe the market share again would be more in China and more limited in other regions would be good. Thank you.

I often say internally there is a limit of 100% on market share and I guess it applies here as well. For practical reasons there are of course I think our customers would like to maintain a vendor diversity. We have to But with the winds we see, we have not been at that limit yet. And actually, I think it's also worth to say that in many type of operators, like you see the announcement we made on an operator today, there is value actually of a sole supplier relationship as well. because that can help our customers to lower the OPEX, lower their own costs, so to say, and we can provide a lower TCO to them. So I do think it's hard to say where that limit is, because in some operators it's a clear benefit of having just one vendor in the network. And it's a cost benefit, but it's also important that you can launch the same service nationwide At the same time, across your whole network. So it's also a commercial benefit that customers realize that rely on one vendor. So I think there are a number of benefits here that can go in either direction. Of course, we like to have as high as possible. So I'm not going to shy away from that.

That's great. Thank you. Maybe a quick follow-up, if I may, on Open RAN. I mean, it gains a lot of traction, discussions, and also contracts within the industry. What do you feel about the impact, maybe not for this year, obviously, but more in 2021? Do you see an acceleration, and how it could impact Ericsson if there is an acceleration in the industry?

Yeah. You know, what we see, it is a lot of discussions about Open RAN and the pros and cons of that. What I think is important to remember here is that we have said that we're a key contributor to Oran and we will continue to be so. So we believe this is something that clearly is going to happen. So we're going to be making sure that we're well-positioned. That's also why we need to transition towards more of software revenues as well. So I don't really see over on to be a major impact in a 2021-22 timeframe. But after that, I think it will start to impact the revenues for us. It will start to impact the way business models evolve going forward. So I do think one should think of this as as an opportunity where we will position ourselves as well. You know, it's no different than other technology shifts that have happened in the industry. It's all about leading on that development and leading on that front, and then we have a very good opportunity.

Thanks. Thanks, Francois, for those questions. We'll move over to the next question, please, operator.

Our next question comes from the line of Sandeep Deshpande of J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Hi. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for letting me on. Quickly, on the network margin, I mean, when you look at your gross margin, it increased almost 500 bps year on year on a revenue increase of 6%. Maybe you can help us understand how much of that 500 bps was because of the increased scale, how much was because of the increased software, and how much potentially was also a lack of services But another issue here is, you know, you saw a lower revenue in IPR, which is a highly profitable business. So clearly underlying margin increased even more. So maybe you can help us understand how that margin shifted. And I have one quick follow-up on revenue.

You know... When we set out our strategy in 2017, I want to tie it back to that. We said clearly that increased scale is important. And increased footprint is critical for us. And that is because there are a number of very large fixed costs in this industry. R&D being one, but it actually applies in other parts of our value chain as well. So volume... is critically important. And that's why we have invested and continue to invest in what we call strategic contracts. We don't talk about them as much now because they're kind of part of our normal business. But that's why we highlighted them in the past because we needed to gain scale. So what you see is the scale question is actually critical in driving this improved gross margin. So that's one thing. The second thing is we also said that R&D is a way to lower the cost. And we do that by increasing the pace of introducing new ASICs, for example. So what we have been able to do is actually to offer today a more cost competitive portfolio. And that's really driven by R&D investments. that it's very hard to isolate each part out in an hour, but you see those are key contributors. Then we say that, and that's quite clear, we have a bit more software sales this quarter than we expect in Q4 and than we had last year. So that's also a factor. But I think the key drivers remain actually our quality increase scale and the lower... production cost in the portfolio.

Understood. Thanks, Bure. A follow-up on revenue in Europe. We've seen over the last couple of months or more share shifts in Europe, but revenue from those share shifts doesn't seem to have come through in the sense that you've done better overall in Europe than the market has done. But when does the big 5G rollout start in Europe from these big share shifts?

The reality is, if you look, what you see while we're growing in Europe is the share increase. But these are contracts that we won in 2018 and 2019. So it's not the current wins. It takes several quarters before those come through in our revenues. So that will take a bit more time before you see all of the gains coming through. But of course, we feel quite comfortable about our situation in Europe where we see a healthy increase in market share also going forward based on already announced wins. So that is what we see going to happen.

Thank you. Thanks, Sandeep. We'll move to the next question, please.

Our next question comes from the line of Sebastian Stapovich of Kepler Chevro. Please go ahead.

Good morning, Sebastian. How are you? Hi, everyone, and thanks for taking the question. Just yesterday, the Swedish regulator has just banned one way from 5G networks in Sweden, and they are going on a number of countries all across Europe doing the same. So basically, do you see any risk on your market position in China on 5G if sometimes the Chinese government decide to retaliate against European vendors? This would be the first question. The second one is, the higher software sales in Q3 and the lower software sales expected in Q4, is it linked to your dynamic spectrum sharing deployment? Could you come back a little bit? How do you see this technology being deployed those days? Is it something that positively contributed to Q3, notably in the US? Thank you.

You know, it's a very speculative question on... bands, non-bands, and geopolitical situation. I think it's fair to say that countries have to decide on the geopolitical situation, national security on their own, and that's something we let them do. We focus instead on doing what we can and what we can impact. And what we really can impact You know, it's actually the competitiveness of our portfolio, providing our customers with the right features and right products. And if we can continue to do that, that will allow us to be much more successful as a company. And the reality is we thrive in a situation where there is competition. Competition drives out the best from us. We will be more innovative. We provide better solutions to customers. So I welcome that we have competition and that we have a global competition. The reality is the cellular market is different from most others. So of course, like Huawei, it's actually one of our fiercest competitors around the world in the product market. At the same time, we cooperate when we drive the 3GPP standard. And the reality, this type of Competition cooperation is what has allowed the cellular industry to connect 8 billion subscribers around the world. So today we're free to travel to any country in the world with very few exceptions and we can connect our phone. That's something that comes out of a very healthy ecosystem that's driven between competition on the one hand and cooperation on the other hand. And we think that is something that will continue and should continue. So we certainly hope that for the rest of the world, so to say, that we actually can continue, cooperate and compete at the same time. And, you know, we need to be innovative. When we face that type of competition, we need to be more innovative. And it's the only thing that we can impact as a company. So we try to focus on that and work on that. The other question on the software revenues, they are always going to be a bit lumpy between quarters. That's the way it is. Of course, our success on dynamic spectrum sharing is a key reason why we have software revenues. And we've said it all along. We have our hardware being 5G ready, so it's all about the software upgrades, and in a way that's what we get paid for. Then Q4, it's historically always a much higher ratio of service revenues. So if service revenues go up, something has to go down, as it can only add up to 100%. So that's why you are going to see a bit lower proportion of software revenues.

Thanks, Sebastian. Operator, we're not ready for the last question now for this call, so please.

Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of Amit Hachandani of Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Hi, Amit. Thank you. Good morning, all. Amit Hachandani from Citi. Two questions, if I may. My first question relates to how you're thinking about 2021, please. You talked about, I believe, North America growing into 2021. And I was wondering, given that we are already close to the end of this year, if you could share your visibility into 2021 and what you expect the market growth to be and whether you expect yourselves to outperform the market. So any thoughts about visibility across regions into 2021? And secondly, if I may, going back to the question on margins, We've seen strong margin performance coming through and despite FX headwinds, despite a ramp in China, despite lower IPR, you're clearly delivered upon some of the investments made in R&D. So as we think about the secular margin profile of the company, I know we have an ambition for 2022, but is there any reason why we as the financial community shouldn't start getting more excited about about you getting to the higher end of the margins and whether these targets could potentially turn out to be conservative. Thank you.

I think I will have Carl to respond to those questions. I thought so. When it comes to 2021, you know that we're not guiding specifically and I think it's a bit early to to look into 2021. But of course, we do have a strong position in the market. We do see market share gains, as we have been talking about. And of course, 2021 is on the road towards the 2022 target, which we stick to, as you know. Then we have flagged for a couple of things, including what Börje talked about before on IPR, which could lead to a temporary gap in revenues there. But we think that's manageable. But in general, I would say we see a growth coming from market share gains, not least in Europe. The overall round market growth in 2021, according to Deloro, is 2%. And of course, our ambition is given the market share gains and the strategy we have and the scale aspect that Börje talked about, our ambition is obviously to grow faster than that. China will continue in the deployment as mentioned as well before and we expect that to grow And North America finally I mean very good and continued momentum also also next year So so that's how we look at that And excitement is good on your second question of course excitement about Ericsson and opportunities is always good and But remember when we set the targets back in 2017 for both 2020 and then 2022, refined a bit during the journey here. I mean, many people didn't at all believe that we would reach them. Now we are closer to the end of 2020 and we have greater confidence that we will reach those. And then we shift focus to, of course, reaching the 2022 targets. Well, the more long term, I think we also come back to that perspective on the capital markets day on the 10th of November. And, you know, what's important just to add is we are always focused on driving a long term successful Ericsson. So during this phase from 17 to today, we've been focusing on making the long term investments to strengthen our long term competitiveness. So for us, I will be honest to say, we're not going to focus on 2020 or 2021 or 2022. But those are important milestones to showcase our ability to deliver. But we are really focused on the 2025 and beyond timeframe. And that's why we're also extraordinarily optimistic about our positioning in the market, where we see that we are gaining footprint on on our network, but we're seeing that we're gaining footprint on 5G core and our orchestration offerings. So we're seeing great progress there, but all of that is really there only to make sure that 2025 and beyond, we're an even stronger company.

You are good with that, Amit?

Thank you, yes.

Thank you. Thank you. So before handing over to Börje's closing remark, I just want to repeat what Carl said about the capital market day on the 10th of November. But also, actually, we have the update from the markets coming up next week, Thursday and Friday. So please be aware and tune in then at the next week's market address update and the capital market day on November 10th. With that, I would like to hand over to Börje for the closing remarks.

Thanks, Peter. So just as an ending, I want to thank you for your time today. And thank you for very good questions. What we see is that our strategy to invest in technology leadership is clearly paying off. And we are now winning share in a highly competitive market. We believe that 5G will be critical platform for digitalizing enterprises. basically there will be no digitalization without mobility and we are well positioned in mobility to develop the enterprise use cases like we do with cradle point and dedicated networks and our iot accelerator and we are convinced this will provide us with a long-term growth potential that's going to be very attractive we will discuss those plans much more in detail at the capital markets update next month and hopefully as many of you as possible can join that event so once again thank you everyone for dialing into this telephone conference