Ericsson today abutted continued fallout due to a long-running bribery and financial corruption scandal with a pair of 5G customer wins.

The Swedish vendor is now being formally monitored for a three-year period, following last year’s $1.06 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ). In that agreement, Ericsson admitted to a 17-year long bribery scandal involving high-ranking government officials and the falsification of financial documents. 

The company also agreed to operate under an independent compliance monitor and has selected Andreas Pohlmann, partner at Pohlmann & Co. based in Frankfurt, Germany, to review Ericsson’s compliance with the terms of the settlement. Pohlmann will also measure the company’s progress in implementing tighter financial controls and other recommendations, according to Ericsson.

Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm called the actions “completely unacceptable and a hugely upsetting chapter in our history,” when the settlement was reached in December 2019 after a six-year investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the DoJ.

The company claims the criminal activity, which spanned six countries, ended in the first quarter of 2017 and it fired 50 people in 2018 following an internal investigation. Current Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg led Ericsson between 2010 and mid-2016 — or six months prior to when these activities were alleged to have stopped — when he abruptly resigned following several underperforming quarters. Vestberg was at Ericsson for 19 years, and replaced Carl-Henric Svanberg, who left Ericsson to become chairman at BP. 

In an apparent bid to put a more positive spin on entering a three-year period of oversight from an outside party, Ericsson also announced new 5G contracts with Bell Canada and Telefónica Deutschland. Bell Canada plans to expand its 5G coverage with radio access network (RAN) equipment from Ericsson, including gear that will support 3.5 GHz spectrum following an auction by the Canadian government later this year, according to Ericsson. 

Telefónica Deutschland also inked a deal with Ericsson to deploy the vendor’s standalone 5G core with full cloud compatibility before the end of this year. Ericsson released the dual-mode 5G core with cloud-native infrastructure in February 2020. 

The mobile core network market grew 10% year-over-year to almost $8 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2020, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group. The analyst firm predicts 5G core sales growth will accelerate during the next year at a rate of 14%.

Huawei and Ericsson combined to claim more than half of the 5G mobile core market during the first quarter of 2020, according to Dell’Oro Group. Nokia, ZTE, and Cisco captured a combined 25% of the market during the quarter, it added.

As 5G mobile core deployments gain momentum, network function virtualization will follow in kind, analysts at Dell’Oro Group noted. The firm expects the technology to reach about 70% of networks in the first quarter of 2021. 

Ericsson today also provided an update on its 5G sales. The vendor said it has 93 commercial 5G agreements or contracts with network operators and 40 live 5G networks in 22 countries. The company said it has 86 commercial 5G contracts and 29 live 5G networks at the end of March.