Swedish telecommunications equipment giant Ericsson says the worst is over for the global mobile market, which could even see a modest resumption of growth this year.
Presenting its 2003 results, Ericsson reported a return to profit in the fourth quarter, after ten quarters of net losses, but remained in loss for the full year.
'We believe that the market has stabilised and our view is that the global mobile systems market in 2004, measured in US dollars, will be in line with, or show slight growth, compared to 2003,' chief executive Carl-Henric Svanberg said.
He said Ericsson's own drastic restructuring was now 'over', with just some minor adjustments remaining until the autumn of this year. During its painful period of readjustment since 2000, Ericsson's workforce halved from over 100,000 to 51,600 by the end of 2003, and further bloodletting is to take its payroll to 47,000 this year.
For the fourth quarter, Ericsson reported small net profit of €15.4m. For 2003 as a whole, it remained in the red, but the net loss narrowed to €1.2 billion.
Looking ahead, Svanberg said the first quarter of this year would show earnings growth compared with the same period of 2003, even if it would remain below the seasonally strong fourth quarter, which could imply a loss for the first three months of the year.
But he cautioned that some of the growth could be generated by telecom operators catching up with their investment after cautiously holding back from spending during the industry downturn.
Commenting on third generation mobile devices, which are capable of sending and receiving large batches of video and audio content, Svanberg said he had been 'encouraged by the 3G sales during the quarter'.
