The merger of Nokia's and Siemens' wireless infrastructure business into NSN has never looked like a perfect marriage, and rumours about its future have been commonplace.
However, a new analysis of its likely future from Trefis claims that LTE could help limit the company's decline as it comes under increasing market pressure from Huawei and ZTE. The stock market analyst firm believes that NSN is showing strong progress in LTE, especially in the last quarter with major wins with Telenor Denmark and TeliaSonera.
Adding these to the NSN's growing list of global reference accounts gives NSN the highest number of LTE customers in the industry, says Trefis. In addition, NSN added ten new 3G customers in Q4 2009, taking their overall customer count to an industry-leading 170. Regardless, Trefis maintains that NSN's market share of 19 per cent today will steadily decline to 18 per cent by 2012.
However, the company made several bullish presentations at MWC claiming that its technology was beating its rivals, and pointed to the statement from Iliad's Free Mobile in France that it was in exclusive negotiations with NSN for the supply of a 3G network.
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