Hasta La Creative!

For Ericsson’s newly departed chief executive officer, Hans Vestberg, the future didn’t come fast enough.

While waiting for spending on so-called 5G networks to kick in, Ericsson, one of the world’s biggest makers of networking equipment, has been losing sales to competitors like Nokia Oyj, which broadened its portfolio with the purchase of Alcatel-Lucent SA, and Huawei Technologies, which is beating Ericsson on price while offering a wider array of products. After another weak earnings report last week, Standard & Poor’s warned on Monday that it could downgrade Ericsson’s debt rating.

The global telecom carriers that are Ericsson’s biggest customers are mostly done deploying the current generation of 4G networks that can handle cloud computing and streaming video. Mr. Vestberg has been a leading advocate of 5G, which will handle futuristic exploits like self-driving cars and remote surgery, but it hasn’t been deployed yet.

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