Eurobites: Doubt Cast on Ericsson Reporting

News Analysis Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe 7/18/2016

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: full Opera sale falls through; Huawei does German deal; UK government's Mr Broadband moved on.

Shares in Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) fell 4.3% Monday morning after a Swedish newspaper questioned the way the vendor had booked anticipated future sales from long-term contracts which had yet to be invoiced. As Reuters reports, citing Svenska Dagbladet, Ericsson denied that it had done anything wrong, referring to its annual report, which states that it feels justified in reporting sales "when collection is reasonably assured." Ericsson is due to report second-quarter results on Tuesday.

The proposed $1.2 billion sale of Norwegian browser and apps firm Opera Software ASA to a Chinese consortium led by Qihoo 360 has fallen through after failing to win regulatory approval, according to press reports. However, the group will acquire certain bits of Opera -- including its mobile and desktop browser operations -- for $600 million, under the terms of a renegotiated deal.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has struck a strategic partnership with German IT services and technology specialist SNP AG that will see the two companies jointly supply hardware, software and consultancy services to enterprise users that are undergoing a "digital transformation." The focus of the partners is to enable companies to deploy SAP HANA database management and data processing technology: Huawei provides the hardware in the form of FusionCube servers and distributed storage technology; SNP provides software, integration and consultancy services to enable companies to migrate to the SAP system, whether they are existing SAP users or not.

The Finnish government is to run an auction later this year for 700MHz frequencies that were once used for TV broadcasts, reports YLE. A similar auction for 800MHz frequencies was carried out in Finland in 2013.

There's been a changing of the guard in the UK government following the enthronement of Theresa May as the country's new prime minister, and one of the losers in the ministerial merry-go-round is Ed Vaizey, the former digital economy minister. Vaizey had faced criticism for his approach to the UK broadband industry, not least for his insistence that BT did not need to be split up from its Openreach network access unit, despite the protestations of BT's rivals. He will be replaced in the role by former Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock. (See Eurobites: UK Minister Cool With BT/Openreach Relationship and UK Govt Minister Calls for 'Gigabit Britain' Push.)

Saudi Telecom Co. (STC) has deployed Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) 's Contrail SDN controller, which interoperates with an OpenStack cloud orchestration platform. The operator hopes that the deployment will reduce time-to-market for services and applications. (See Saudi Telecom Deploys Juniper's Contrail SDN Controller and Juniper's Cloud CPE Makes the Grade.)

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading