Can a European Company Be Globally Sovereign?
Ericsson between European strategic autonomy, American markets and a worldwide communications system
PERSPECTIVE | Europe needs Ericsson to preserve technological agency in mobile communications. Ericsson, however, cannot remain technologically relevant by operating as a protected European supplier. Its research, standards, markets and supply chains are global. The resulting paradox reveals that sovereignty in networked industries is less about independence than about retaining the capacity to shape shared systems.
A mobile base station installed in Texas may contain technology developed in Sweden, software written in India, semiconductors designed in the United States and components manufactured across Asia. It operates according to specifications negotiated by companies and institutions from several continents. What nationality does such a network have?
The question appears simple when viewed from Brussels. Ericsson is Swedish. It is headquartered in Europe, employs European researchers and represents one of the continent’s remaining positions of strength in global communications infrastructure.
Global scale is not the opposite of European sovereignty. It is one of its conditions.
Yet the company cannot function as a purely European enterprise. Its technologies must be accepted by operators around the world. Its patents derive value from global adoption. Its equipment must interoperate with devices, software and networks made by other companies. Its research must influence standards that no single country or region controls.
Ericsson is one of a very small group of companies capable of supplying mobile network infrastructure at global scale. That makes it strategically important to Europe. It also makes the company fundamentally dependent on a world extending far beyond Europe.
This is the central paradox of European technological sovereignty: Europe needs Ericsson to remain technologically sovereign. Ericsson needs an open global market to remain technologically relevant.
Sovereignty without isolation
Sovereignty is often described spatially. Technology should be developed in Europe, produced in Europe, stored in Europe and governed under European law.
For some critical capabilities, geography matters. Governments need to understand where equipment is manufactured, who can access software, which jurisdictions govern suppliers and whether essential components can still be obtained during a crisis.
But communications networks do not stop at national borders. Their economic and technical value comes precisely from their ability to connect different territories, devices and systems. A European mobile standard used only in Europe would not represent sovereignty. It would represent fragmentation.
The success of GSM offers the historical counterexample. It began as a European effort to overcome incompatible national mobile systems, but its strategic importance grew because it travelled. European companies became influential not by keeping the technology within Europe, but by turning a regional architecture into a global one.
Ericsson’s present position rests on the same principle. Research acquires strategic weight when it becomes part of internationally adopted specifications. Patents generate durable value when manufacturers across many markets implement them. Network equipment becomes competitive when it can be deployed across operators, spectrum bands and regulatory systems. Scale is therefore not merely commercial.
In telecommunications, global market presence helps sustain the laboratories, engineers, simulations and test environments from which technical contributions emerge. That research capacity determines the weight a company can carry inside 3GPP, the ITU, the O-RAN Alliance and other international working groups.
Open networks do not eliminate dependence. They determine where dependence moves.
Influence in these institutions is not obtained through market share alone, nor through simple majority voting. Proposals must survive technical scrutiny, demonstrate that they can be implemented and attract support from other participants. But without the resources to remain present across hundreds of meetings, studies and competing proposals, a company’s ability to shape consensus gradually diminishes.
Without global scale, it becomes harder to sustain a meaningful voice in the architecture of 6G. A protected European market might preserve Ericsson’s presence for a time. It could not, by itself, sustain the research capacity required to remain influential across successive generations of mobile technology.
The American test
The United States illustrates this dependence particularly clearly. America contains some of the world’s largest operators, cloud companies, semiconductor designers and digital platforms, but no domestic supplier with the same complete mobile-network position as Ericsson or Nokia. This gives the European companies strategic relevance inside the American communications system. It also gives American customers considerable influence over their direction.
AT&T’s decision to build a large-scale Open RAN network with Ericsson demonstrated the importance of the United States to the Swedish company. The operator said its spending with Ericsson could approach $14 billion over five years as it moved towards a more open, programmable and multi-supplier radio architecture.
For Ericsson, the agreement was more than a major equipment contract. It placed the company close to one of the world’s most consequential attempts to redefine how mobile networks are built, as described in the announcement by AT&T and Ericsson.
But the arrangement also exposes a different form of dependence. A small number of large operators can redirect investment, alter technical requirements and reshape the competitive position of suppliers. Ericsson’s success in the United States therefore strengthens a European company while simultaneously tying part of its future to American procurement decisions.
Greater scale in the United States also brings European infrastructure companies closer to the regulatory gravity of Washington. American export controls, semiconductor restrictions, cybersecurity requirements and industrial policy can affect which components, markets and technological partnerships remain available—even when the company making the equipment is European. This is not an anomaly. It is how infrastructure power works.
Europe retains influence through Ericsson, while Ericsson gains scale through markets and regulatory systems that Europe does not control.
Security changes the market
The geopolitical environment has made this interdependence more visible.
Mobile networks are no longer treated only as commercial infrastructure. They carry government communication, industrial data, emergency services and increasingly the signals exchanged by machines, vehicles and critical systems. Decisions about network suppliers have therefore become decisions about security, resilience and political trust.
European restrictions on high-risk suppliers have improved the strategic position of Ericsson and Nokia in several markets. The European Commission has argued that decisions by member states to restrict Huawei and ZTE are justified under the EU’s 5G cybersecurity framework, as set out in its communication on high-risk suppliers in European 5G networks. Yet this does not turn Ericsson into a protected European utility.
The company must still compete with Nokia, Huawei, ZTE, Samsung and an expanding field of software, cloud and Open RAN participants. Operators continue to demand lower costs, greater energy efficiency and more flexibility. Governments may prefer trusted suppliers, but operators rarely wish to replace technological dependence on one company with dependence on another. Security can narrow the market. It cannot suspend competition.
Nor should European sovereignty be reduced to excluding Chinese suppliers. Removing one dependency does not automatically create technological capacity. Europe must still retain research, engineers, patents, test environments, manufacturing knowledge and companies capable of turning standards into functioning infrastructure.
Sovereignty is not produced by a prohibition alone. It depends on what remains possible afterwards.
Does Open RAN make suppliers less strategic?
Open RAN appears to offer an answer to concentrated supplier power. By opening interfaces between parts of the radio access network, operators aim to combine hardware and software from different companies instead of purchasing a tightly integrated system from a single vendor.
In principle, this should lower barriers to entry and reduce lock-in. New suppliers can specialise in software, radios, cloud infrastructure or system integration. But openness does not eliminate dependence. It redistributes it.
A more modular network requires integration, orchestration, testing and accountability across a larger number of components. The operator may become less dependent on one proprietary equipment stack while becoming more dependent on cloud platforms, semiconductor architectures, software layers and integrators capable of making the system work as a whole.
Ericsson therefore faces a delicate task. It must support greater openness without allowing the intelligence and value of the network to migrate entirely towards American cloud and chip companies. Its response has been to make its own architecture more programmable, cloud-based and accessible through software interfaces.
The company is no longer defending only a box of radio equipment. It is attempting to preserve a central role in a network whose boundaries are becoming less fixed.
This connects directly to the distinction explored earlier in this series. Nokia approaches the future from a broader infrastructure landscape spanning radio, fixed access, IP, optical systems and data centres. Ericsson begins more clearly with the intelligent mobile layer and expands outward.
Open RAN, edge computing and AI bring those visions closer together. They also bring both European companies into more direct contact with American hyperscalers and semiconductor firms.
A company cannot be sovereign alone
This reveals the limitation hidden inside the title of this article.
A company cannot be sovereign in the political meaning of the word. Ericsson does not control spectrum allocation, trade policy, export restrictions, security law or the international institutions in which standards are negotiated. It depends on operators for investment, governments for market access and a global industrial base for components and computing capacity.
Europe cannot remain sovereign in systems it no longer helps design.
Even its strongest patents derive their value from a collective system of standardisation, licensing and enforcement.
What Ericsson can possess is strategic agency. It can retain knowledge that governments and operators need. It can influence which technical options enter future standards. It can preserve alternatives in markets that would otherwise become dependent on suppliers from the United States or China. It can ensure that Europe remains present where communications architectures are designed rather than appearing only after foreign systems have been completed.
The places where this agency is exercised are often highly technical: 3GPP study groups, ITU processes, O-RAN working groups, patent pools, test environments and interoperability trials. They rarely attract the political attention given to factories, subsidies or trade restrictions. Yet they are where research choices begin to crystallise into the rules of a future global system.
That is not autonomy from the world. It is the ability to participate in the world without becoming structurally irrelevant. Europe’s task is therefore not to make Ericsson exclusively European. It is to create the conditions under which Ericsson can remain European while succeeding globally.
That requires a viable home market, sufficient operator investment, research partnerships, access to capital, secure supply chains and sustained European participation in international standardisation. It also requires competition. Europe gains more resilience from having Ericsson and Nokia pursue different technological visions than it would from forcing them into a single protected champion.
Sovereignty that travels
The first article in this series argued that communications infrastructure often arrives before society understands its most important applications. The second showed how research and patents become embedded in the standards underlying that infrastructure. The third distinguished Ericsson’s mobile-centred architecture from Nokia’s broader network vision. Together, they lead to a final conclusion.
Europe’s position in telecommunications cannot be measured only by where equipment is manufactured or where a company has its headquarters. It must also be measured by whether European institutions and companies remain capable of shaping systems used elsewhere.
If Ericsson technologies are deployed in American, Asian and African networks, Europe has not necessarily lost control of them. Their global adoption may be the source of Europe’s influence. It allows European research, patents and engineering choices to remain embedded within the shared architecture of mobile communication.
There are risks. Global exposure creates vulnerability to foreign procurement cycles, trade disputes, export controls and political pressure. Market access can be withdrawn. Supply chains can be disrupted. Standards can become geopolitical arenas. But retreating behind Europe’s borders would not remove those risks. It would reduce the scale with which Europe can respond to them.
Ericsson’s value to Europe grows when its technological influence travels beyond Europe
The approaching transition to 6G makes that distinction urgent. The applications may still be uncertain, but the institutional, technical and intellectual-property choices that will define the network are already beginning to take shape. By the time 6G becomes commercially visible, many of its most consequential dependencies will already have been designed.
European sovereignty in communications cannot therefore mean technological self-sufficiency. In deeply networked and capital-intensive systems, absolute independence is neither realistic nor necessarily desirable.
True sovereignty is not the absence of dependence. It is the capacity to shape, negotiate and govern shared interdependencies. It means retaining sufficient scientific, industrial and architectural weight so that no single external actor can dictate terms or reduce Europe to an unconsulted user of foreign systems.
Ericsson is strategically European not despite its global footprint, but because of it. Its ultimate value to Europe lies not in retreating behind continental borders, but in ensuring that Europe remains an indispensable architect of the world’s communications systems.
This article is part of Ericsson — The Architecture Before the Applications, a four-part series exploring how the company helps shape 6G, global standards and Europe’s technological position.
Credit
Illustration: Altair Media with OpenAI
Caption
A Nordic ship leaves the security of a European harbour for a globally connected sea—reflecting Ericsson’s central paradox: Europe depends on the company for technological agency, while Ericsson depends on worldwide markets, standards and partnerships to remain relevant.
