Davos 2026 Ericsson CEO on Geopolitics, Tariffs and Why AI Will Drive 5G Growth
📅 Jan 20, 2026moneycontrol9 MIN484 VIEWS18 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
At Davos 2026, Ericsson President & CEO Börje Ekholm speaks to Moneycontrol on how geopolitics has reshaped corporate strategy, navigating tariff uncertainty, the telecom industry slowdown, 5G standalone rollout, AI-driven network growth, competition with Chinese players, and why India has emerged as a frontrunner market for Ericsson.
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Questions asked in this interview
8
0:07What does this mean in terms of preparing for the new normal?
Welcome to this MoneyControl interview. We are in conversation with Börje Ekholm, the global CEO of Ericsson. Thank you very much for joining us on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum. Before I begin with very Ericsson-specific questions, tell us a bit about your own assessment of the geopolitics and the uncertainty around tariffs for a global company like Ericsson, which has significant operations around the world. What does this mean in terms of preparing for the new normal?
Yeah, of course this is a situation that is a bit different, and geopolitics have actually played a much bigger role in our lives as a corporation for a number of years. I often say that when I started as CEO in 2017, geopolitics was not part of the job description. So it of course has changed, but I would also say that if you look at ourselves in this context, we actually have created a relatively diverse supply chain. We started to invest early on in that supply chain to actually build manufacturing footprint around the world. So we have a presence in India, we have in the US, we have of course in Europe and in South America and rest of Asia as well. But that have created actually a very flexible supply chain. So the impacts of tariffs so far have been relatively modest.
Of course it's very hard to speculate. I think we as a company, we need to make sure that we're flexible enough so we can act regardless of conditions. And I often say, in geopolitics we're in reality takers. Somebody else decides how it's going to look like and we need to be sure that we can adjust accordingly.
Right. Ericsson was also in the news recently for job cuts amid operators spending. I want to understand, is this a cyclical slowdown or a structural reset for the telecom industry?
I would say, the industry selling telecom equipment to operators have been flat or flattish for 20 years. So we plan for the market to continue to be flat in that sense. And then we need to make sure that we're cost-efficient in everything we do and therefore we need to make those adjustments. And if we look, we've done this in the past as well. So we try to continuously improve our operation as much as possible and now you happen to get the job cut announced last week, but it's part of this global efficiency effort that we actually continue to implement.
I would say actually it's moving very fast now into 5G standalone. So if we look in China, they have only deployed 5G standalone and there we start to see a lot of new applications. It can be drones, factory automation, humanoids, all running on a 5G standalone network. And we're starting to see it in the American operators as well, India, it's happening. So I would say 5G standalone is now starting to be rolled out in the bigger markets. The big question mark is Europe, where we don't really see the build-out yet.
Right. Beyond traditional 5G, where do you see Ericsson's next meaningful growth coming from? Will it be AI-driven networks, enterprise, or something else?
9 more exchanges in this transcript
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Ekholm, B. (2026, January 20). Davos 2026 Ericsson CEO on Geopolitics, Tariffs and Why AI Will Drive 5G Growth [Interview transcript]. moneycontrol. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1012643/
MLA
Börje Ekholm. "Davos 2026 Ericsson CEO on Geopolitics, Tariffs and Why AI Will Drive 5G Growth." moneycontrol, 20 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1012643/.
BibTeX
@misc{ekholm2026_1012643,
author = {Börje Ekholm},
title = {Davos 2026 Ericsson CEO on Geopolitics, Tariffs and Why AI Will Drive 5G Growth},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, moneycontrol. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1012643/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
