Ericsson Plans To Roll Out CDMA Phone In 1st Half Of 2000
By Quentin Hardy
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Swedish telecommunications equipment giant Telefon AB LM Ericsson (ERICY) plans to enter the market for digital mobile telephones using the CDMA standard in the first half of next year, with a single model designed to sell "in good volume," said the company's chief executive.
The company also plans to be fully in the CDMA infrastructure business "in six months," Sven-Christer Nilsson, Ericsson's chief executive officer, told Dow Jones. Nilsson was visiting San Francisco as part of a nationwide trip to speak with potential investors.
Nilsson said Ericsson's first entry into the market for code-division multiple access wireless phones would resemble Ericsson's current T28 model, a thin pocket-sized phone with voice-activation capability. "We'll probably have just one model" for CDMA users, he said. "A good volume phone, and very competitive."
The T28 works on a standard called GSM, which stands for global system for mobile communication. Ericsson has historically preferred GSM to CDMA, a standard that is increasingly popular in the U.S. In March, however, Ericsson agreed to purchase the CDMA infrastructure assets of Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM), and signaled it would also enter the CDMA handset business.
Qualcomm had struggled in the infrastructure business, partly because it lacked the technology to build an effective telecommunications switching system, and partly because it lacked the size of competitors like Northern Telecom Ltd. (NT) and Motorola Inc. (MOT). Nilsson said his company would easily make up for those deficits.
"We're selecting our markets now," he said. "We'll be in there in six months, with fully integrated products. I'll be very aggressive, I tell you."
WSJ 5/11/99
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