According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the telecommunications, networks and data center IT industries, preliminary findings suggest the positive momentum that has characterized the RAN market over the past four years extended into the first quarter. However, external challenges, including COVID-19 restrictions and supply chain disruptions, taken together with more challenging year-over-year comparisons, impacted the growth rate. Preliminary estimates suggest that the overall 2G–5G RAN infrastructure equipment market—including hardware, software and firmware—increased at the slowest pace in more than two years.

“Even with the RAN results now coming in below expectations two quarters in a row, it is important to keep in mind that it is still early days in the broader 5G cycle and fundamentals remain healthy,” said Stefan Pongratz, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. “We have not made any major adjustments to the aggregate forecast and still expect the broader RAN market to record a fifth consecutive year of growth in 2022, underpinned by elevated investments in North America, Europe and China,” continued Pongratz.

Additional highlights from the 1Q 2022 RAN report:

• Top five suppliers in the quarter include Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung
• Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and Samsung lead outside of China while Huawei and ZTE continued to dominate the Chinese RAN market
• Non-top five suppliers collectively gained around 2 percentage points of share in 1Q 2022.