With one of the fastest 5G rollouts in the world, India by this year-end will be ahead of most countries, said Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm. The country has a strong pool of good software engineers, and “that’s going to drive the next level of growth in India and that makes it for us a very important market,” he said in an interview on March 15.
Ekholm said that Ericsson already has about 25,000 employees in India. “We continue to grow and we strengthen our presence in R&D, software development, service delivery, AI, automation, and all of those areas. We provide the critical infrastructure, the software and hardware that build the 5G network. So we are quite excited about our presence in India,” he added.
In spite of a late launch, behind some of the leading telecom markets like the USA and South Korea, 5G technology deployment in India has become the fastest in the world. In the US, where 5G was launched in early-2019, a complete roll out is yet to materialise. As per estimates, only about 100 million, or 30 per cent, of its population is so far covered through 5G telecom services. The technology is expected to transform areas as diverse as healthcare, agriculture, education, disaster management, smart cities and entertainment in the country.
