Masorange abre la puja para su nueva red de radio móvil
Invita a Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia y Samsung a una licitación, que se iniciaría en octubre, para seleccionar a los proveedores de sus estaciones base. Leer
Masorange, Spain's second largest telecom operator and the largest in terms of customers, has recently sent invitations to four manufacturers of radio equipment for its mobile phone network to take part in a bidding process starting from October. The aim is to select future providers of the network and resolve the matter by mid-December.
The four chosen suppliers are Swedish Ericsson and Chinese Huawei, who are currently the providers of Masorange's network, as well as Finnish Nokia and South Korean Samsung. Masorange, controlled 100% by the French telecom company Orange, declined to comment on the information.
The invitation to Nokia and Samsung could mean the entry of a new network provider for Masorange, which has never worked with either of the two manufacturers. In the case of Samsung, it would mark the company's entry into the Spanish market, where it has never been present in the mobile network infrastructure business, although it is a historical leader in the smartphone business and has a much larger corporate size than Ericsson and Nokia.
Conversely, Finnish Nokia is a historical provider of Telefónica's mobile network, which shares almost 50% with Ericsson, but has never been present in either Orange or Vodafone Spain.
Masorange's plans contemplate, in case it ends up selecting one of the two new providers, assigning them market shares that could reach up to 30% of the plant. This participation would be much higher than the one ZTE had with Masorange, which started to be phased out from 2024. The process puts into question the agreement reached in the summer of 2024 that aimed to reduce Huawei's presence by increasing Ericsson's, and even have Ericsson become the sole provider of the network by 2028.
Although the reduction of Huawei's presence and the increase of Ericsson is happening, it is not guaranteed that Ericsson will become the sole provider by 2028. The process is completely open, and it may even fail to take place, and instead turn into a bilateral negotiation between Masorange and the current providers, Ericsson and Huawei.
The future decisions on Masorange's network provider will be determined mainly by the aggressiveness of the manufacturers' economic offers.
Written by urgent.news from Expansion ES's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
