The telecommunications equipment market remains Huawei’s to lose. The Chinese vendor, despite a years-long effort by the U.S. government and some of its allies to cripple its business, continued to rise and gain share through the first three quarters of 2020, according to Dell’Oro Group.

Huawei’s global market share grew from 28% in 2018, to 30% during the first nine months of this year, the research firm concluded in a new report. Dell’Oro Group’s industry-wide assessment of telecommunications infrastructure for wired and wireless networks includes broadband access, microwave and optical transport, mobile core, radio access network (RAN) equipment, routers, and carrier Ethernet switches.

“The overall telecom equipment market continued to appear disconnected from the underlying economy,” Dell’Oro Group VP Stefan Pongratz wrote in a blog post. “While the ongoing transition from 4G to 5G is helping to offset reduced capex in slower-to-adopt mobile broadband markets, we also attribute the disconnect to the growing importance of connectivity and the nature of this recession being different than in other downturns improving the visibility for the operators."

Investments and ongoing telecommunications deployments in China outpaced the global market, which led Huawei and ZTE to collectively gain about 3% market share from 2019 to Q3 2020. The Chinese vendors comprised 41% of the global telecom equipment market through the end of September 2020, according to Dell’Oro Group.

Huawei’s woes present competing network equipment vendors that successfully displace the vendor with an opportunity to land $5 billion in sales in 2021, and up to $17 billion in sales in 2024, Ryan Koontz, analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, wrote in a recent report. Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung are poised to gain a significant portion of those sales. Ericsson could land up to 50% of displaced RAN sales, and Nokia could gain about 20% Huawei’s RAN business losses, he added.

Nokia, which Huawei’s closest competitor in the Dell'Oro report, experienced a 1% decline during the reporting period, sliding from a 16% share in 2019, to 15% at the end of Q3. Ericsson held steady with a 14% share of the market, and ZTE grew from a 9% to 11% share during the comparative reporting period.

Rounding out the top seven suppliers, Cisco slid from 7% to 6%, Ciena held its 3% share, and Samsung dipped from 3% to 2%, Dell’Oro Group concluded. The group of seven leading telecommunications vendors accounted for 81% of the total market, which grew 9% year over year during the third quarter and 5% year over year for the nine-month period.

The global market declined 4% year over year during the first quarter of this year, but the firm said that dip has since been offset and reversed by strong growth in optical transport, 5G RAN, 5G core, and microwave mobile backhaul. Investments in microwave transport, routers, and carrier Ethernet switches declined during the first nine months of the year. 

Dell’Oro Group maintains its overall outlook for the market and expects telecommunications equipment sales to grow up to 6% in 2020, and as much as 4% in 2021, projecting total sales to approach $95 billion next year.