Ericsson scored a multi-year network management deal with India’s Bharti Airtel, which builds on the vendor’s extensive position within India’s telecom market.

The deal has Ericsson deploying its centralized network operations center (NOC) to manage Bharti Airtel’s nationwide 4G, 5G non-standalone (NSA), 5G standalone (SA), fixed-wireless access (FWA), private networks, and network slicing services. That management will include Ericsson equipment and that from other vendors.

Ericsson posted a 17-percent year-over-year drop in sales across its Southeast Asia, Oceania, and India channels during the first quarter of this year, which company management tied to a difficult comparison because of robust sales in 2024.

Ericsson extends India connections

Ericsson has a long-standing working relationship with Bharti Airtel’s 5G network. This includes early work on developing 5G use cases that tapped into a 5G-specific lab Ericsson opened in India in mid-2018.

Those efforts accelerated in 2022 when Bharti Airtel signed deals with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung to build out the carrier’s 5G network. This led Ericsson to expand its production capacity in India on the heels of the vendor scoring significant deals to provide 5G equipment to that country’s telecom operators.

Ericsson furthered its India production presence earlier this year when it said it plans to construct all of its passive antennas targeted at the India market within that country. That production will be through local partners, with excess capacity tied into Ericsson’s broader global supply chain.

That global supply chain has been under pressure due to US government-led tariff uncertainty. Ericsson has some US-based production capabilities but has warned that it remains a challenge to quickly adjust that production to meet rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions.

“When it comes to production, we have U.S. production sites where we can produce,” CFO Lars Sandström said during the vendor’s last earnings call. “We don't give exact numbers on how much is coming from where. And … we have production in the U.S., South America, and Europe, and part of Asia, and we can shift volumes between sites. But it's not a quick change, of course, … we don't do any big changes now because we don't know actually where we land. So we will see here in the coming months if we choose to ramp up, ramp down between different sites, but it's very depending on where the tariffs actually land at the end of the day.”