• 5G NR shipments driving growth
• China rollouts faster than expected
• Huawei and ZTE gain market share

Despite the pressures on international business from the Covid-19 pandemic, the radio access network (RAN) equipment market has continued to grow and even accelerated during the first half of 2020, according to market research firm Dell’Oro.

“With the RAN market advancing at the fastest pace in nearly ten years, there are signs that the market is accelerating at a much faster pace than initially expected,” the research firm noted in this media release.

While market rankings didn’t change compared with 2019, with Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia holding the top three positions, significant 5G investments in China boosted the market shares of Huawei and ZTE “as the Chinese suppliers reached new revenue share highs.”

“Initial findings suggest that we correctly assumed that the importance of connectivity in combination with the on-going 5G rollouts by the early adopters would be enough to offset weaker developments in the less advanced MBB markets resulting in a RAN market that appears disconnected from the underlying economy,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President with the Dell’Oro Group. “At the same time, it is increasingly clear that we underestimated the magnitude of the 5G acceleration in some of the advanced MBB markets,” continued Pongratz, with 5G NR radio shipments growing almost sixfold during the first half of the year. 

The assessment comes only days after Ericsson announced it had struck its 100^th 5G deal.

Dell’Oro expects cumulative investments in RAN systems to “eclipse $200 billion” for the 2019-2024 period. (See Dell’Oro forecasts growth for RAN, core, optical, data centre markets.)