Although Nokia has struggled to compete with big players like Ericsson and Huawei over the past few years, the Finnish company is still a major player in the network infrastructure industry. Samsung also has its own Radio Access Network (RAN) arm, but it is relatively small, with a reported market share of around 6.1% last year.
There have been industry rumors that Samsung is looking to buy Nokia’s infrastructure to strengthen its own RAN position. A reported $10 billion sale has been floated. If the deal goes through, Samsung will effectively become the world’s second-largest RAN vendor, with a 25.6% market share.
Samsung already makes 4G and 5G base stations, chipsets, devices, radios and basic equipment, so it’s not like the Korean giant is new to the infrastructure business. It has supplied operators around the world, including Telus Canada, O2 in Germany, Reliance Jio in India, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Dish and Verizon in the US and Vodafone in the UK.
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