Telecom Equipment Market Revenue Fell 5% in 2023: Dell'Oro

After five years of growth, “the pendulum swung rapidly towards the negative” in the second half of 2023 in the worldwide telecom equipment market, Dell’Oro Group’s Stefan Pongratz said Wednesday in a blog post. Revenue decreased across the six telecom programs tracked -- broadband access, microwave and optical transport, mobile core network, radio access network, and service provider router and switch -- with overall performance worse than expected. “There are multiple forces at play,” Pongratz wrote: “First and foremost, challenging comparisons in some of the advanced 5G markets with higher 5G population coverage taken together with the slow transition towards 5G [stand alone] helped to partially explain steep declines in wireless-based investments.” The aggregate telecom equipment fell by roughly a fifth in the North America region, “underpinned by weak activity in both RAN and Broadband Access.” Market conditions “are expected to remain challenging in 2024, though the decline is projected to be less severe than in 2023,” he said.