Cisco and VMware highlighted the yin and yang of telecom equipment vendors last year, with the former posting a significant drop in segment market share and the other surging, according to a new report from MTN Consulting.

The research firm reported that Cisco posted lower telecom-related revenues last year compared to 2021. It tagged this to “lumpy customer capex,” though it also pointed to commentary from Cisco management that cited improving supply chain issues. Cisco was ranked as the No. 8 vendor in terms of overall market share for 2022.

“Cisco’s decline is worrying as its largest market (the U.S.) saw strong capex and a growing focus on 5G core, which Cisco has flagged in the past as key to the company growing telco revenues,” the report noted.

The commentary was in stark contrast to a similar MTN report last year that had Cisco as one of the market’s largest share gainers.

Cisco did enter 2023 with some momentum as it’s powering T-Mobile US’ cloud-native 5G core gateway platform. That platform is based on Cisco’s cloud-native control plane that uses Kubernetes to orchestrate containers running on bare metal and allows the carrier to run nearly all of its voice and data traffic on this cloud-native 5G standalone (SA) core, including its recently expanded 5G voice-over new radio (VoNR) service.

NEC, Airspan and Casa Systems were also highlighted as losing market share in 2022. Those results were tied to currency fluctuations, regional deployment challenges and to still lingering supply chain issues.

VMware, conversely, was lauded as one of the market’s fast risers in 2022, with MTN noting the vendor reported a 90% increase in segment revenue growth compared with 2021. “It is assisting telcos in improving the overall customer experience and driving operational excellence amid declining top-line,” the report noted.

VMware has been actively picking up telecom operator contracts backed by its Telco Cloud Platform that supports a growing number of virtualized radio access network (vRAN) products. This includes its recent integration of Samsung’s vRAN platform to run on Dish Network’s expanding 5G network.

MTN did note that Rakuten Symphony witnessed the most robust growth last year. The vendor reported approximately $390 million in segment revenues last year, which was four-times more than it reported in 2021.

Rakuten Symphony’s management has stated the vendor ended 2022 with a sales pipeline in excess of $4 billion in revenues, which was significantly more than the $3.1 billion it had at the end of its third-fiscal quarter of 2022.

MTN’s overall market picture for last year was less dramatic. It found Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia continued to dominate the market, though their combined 37.3% market share continued to decline from the more than 40% combined they had controlled.

The research firm blamed this drop on Huawei’s continued geopolitical struggles and growing expansion of hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google Cloud into the market.

A pair of China-based vendors – China Comservice and ZTE – snagged the No. 4 and No. 5 positions, respectively, in the MTN report. The former is a joint venture between China’s three nationwide telecommunications operators, while ZTE has been tied to many of the same geopolitical challenges impacting larger rival Huawei.

Chip-giant Intel was No. 6 on the MTN list, boosted by its deep work in powering data center, virtualization and edge compute services, with networking vendor CommScope surpassing Cisco for the No. 7 position. NEC and Amdocs rounded out the top 10.