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Telecom equipment maker Ericsson plans to lay off 8,500 of its employees globally to cut costs, according to a memo sent to employees from the company’s CEO Börje Ekholm. “The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice,” Ekholm wrote. According to Reuters, the layoffs are predicted to affect North America and would be the largest to hit the telecom industry. The company announced Monday that about 1,400 jobs in Sweden will be slashed as well. “In several countries, the headcount reductions have already been communicated this week,” he said. Ericsson is the latest telecom...

Will Donald Trump score an important victory against China by locking out Huawei from western networks? The Economist tried mightily to avoid giving personal credit to Trump in its analysis of decisions by the UK and Canada to exclude the regime-linked firm from its 5G projects. Instead, they cast it instead as “America’s war on Huawei” while noting that the final battle will take place in Berlin.That didn’t fool Donald Trump, who retweeted it out to his followers: The Economist’s unsigned analysis of the Huawei fight is sound enough, but for some reason they barely mention Trump at all,...

PARIS -- If the UK allows Chinese multinational Huawei to participate in building a new-generation cellular communications network, the CIA is going to take its ball and go home. That's the message Mick Mulvaney, U.S. President Donald Trump's acting chief of staff, delivered in a speech at the Oxford Union last week just before his meeting with British officials. Mulvaney and Trump are concerned that your selfies and your mom's Facebook rants about the neighbor could be laughed at by some military intelligence officer in Beijing via secret backdoors installed in Huawei equipment. Those who don't know any better say...

Ericsson Subsidiary Pleads Guilty to FCPA Violations Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (Ericsson or the Company), a multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, has agreed to pay total penalties of more than $1 billion to resolve the government’s investigation into violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) arising out of the Company’s scheme to make and improperly record tens of millions of dollars in improper payments around the world.  This includes a criminal penalty of over $520 million and approximately $540 million to be paid to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a related matter.  An Ericsson...

Now, a story in the Sunday Telegraph is just the latest to pose serious questions. The newspaper reports that China has been "rigging" 5G equipment testing to discredit Huawei's rivals, including Nokia and Ericsson. According to government and industry sources, "Beijing is feeding secret details of security vulnerabilities" to the testers to tip the balance in Huawei's favor. The testing encompasses "hacking techniques used to check for weak spots... vulnerabilities discovered by China’s secret state hackers have been passed to the 5G testers to ensure Nokia and Ericsson’s equipment is found to be insecure." Huawei's security issues have always been...

Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson is planning to end all of its manufacturing in the country, according to a report in newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD). Part of a savings plan detailed on an internal document which SvD gained access to, the decision would mean that 3,000 employees lose their jobs following the closure of Ericsson’s last manufacturing plants in Sweden, in Borås and Kumla. In the document, Ericsson’s leadership are said to have stated that “We will end a 140-year-old manufacturing period, which represents the biggest cuts of employees in Sweden ever”. The company employs a total of around 15,000 people...

Just one day after the global premiere of Clinton Cash, Hans Westberg, the embattled CEO and president of telecoms company Ericsson, stepped down as the head of the Swedish wireless equipment maker. Though the telecom giant’s announcement to remove Westberg is not confirmed as a direct result of the film’s online popularity, the company’s timing is an odd coincidence. The New York Times best-selling book Clinton Cash, authored by Government Accountability Institute President and Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, highlighted that Ericsson — on Westberg’s watch — had come under heavy fire for selling telecom equipment to countries that were...

That Carly Fiorina was a one-woman wrecking crew during her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard was never in doubt. But what follows is a tale that is now being picked up and distributed as the Republican Party seeks a nominee who combines business savvy and executive know-how. Sadly, the former executive who most closely fits this particular bill also has exhibited the kind of corporate arrogance and blind certitude that came close to sinking what had been considered among the world’s best technology companies: Hewlett-Packard. At HP beginning in the mid-1990s, Fiorina was responsible for the ill-fated merger with Compaq,...

The Swedish firm Ericsson is working with Iran's largest mobile telecom operator to expand its network and has promised to support another Iranian mobile carrier until 2021, according to interviews and an internal company document. The involvement of Ericsson, the world's largest mobile network equipment maker, comes at a time when many Western companies have stopped doing business in Iran because of international sanctions or concerns about damage to their reputations. While Ericsson argues in the internal document that telecommunications are a "basic humanitarian service," Iranian human rights groups say Iran's regime has used the country's mobile-phone networks to track...

A scientist who found deep grooves chiselled into the teeth of dozens of 1,000-year-old Viking skeletons unearthed in Sweden believes the strange custom might have been learned from aboriginal tribes during ancient Norse voyages to North America -- a finding that would represent an unprecedented case of transatlantic, cross-cultural exchange during the age of Leif Ericsson. The marks are believed to be decorations meant to enhance a man's appearance, or badges of honour for a group of great warriors or successful tradesmen. They are the first historical examples of ceremonial dental modification ever found in Europe, and although similar customs...

Stardate 20021005.2128 (On Screen): As I think many of my readers know, I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones. Qualcomm is the company which invented CDMA, and made it practical, and made it into a market success, and it now dominates the American market, where Verizon and Sprint both use it. There are two other nationwide cellular systems: AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA, which is obsolete and has no upgrade path. Cingular uses GSM, a more sophisticated form of TDMA from Europe. And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major case of schadenfreude. The...

Walter Isaacsson has, recently, completed a great work on Steve Jobs. My relatives will probably force me to read it (even though Isaacson was the former head of CNN, they're Conservatives and I'm a 42 year old with a will of my own) but prefer his magnificent study of Einstein as far books go. Anyhow, what do people actually understand about how and in what ways the IT sector of the economy has transformed all of our lives? Being Swedish, I wish to draw attention to what a marvelous revolution a certain poor peasant boy from the region of Värmland...

Every nation could be described as a manifestation of a unique trait of character and most countries furthermore nurture, give emphasize to and celebrate this national identity of theirs. Some examples of such key national characters (please DO comment if you feel inclined to); USA: Liberty Italy: Creativity France: Refinement India: Spirituality Germany: Self-discipline Finland: "Sisu" (a Finnish term meaning "To have guts") Britain: Elevatedness Denmark: "Hygge" (a Danish word meaning "Good-naturedness", of mind as well as of deed) Spain: Passion China: Cultivation Russia: Chaos - just joking, I would actually say "Heart" (in the sense of having a big...

Yet another example of how evil, capitalist globalization is impairing the living conditions of poorer nations..(sarcasm) The article: "Bharti Airtel has awarded Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) an estimated USD 1 billion contract, including expansion and an upgrade of its GSM/GPRS network and managed services. The deal will enable Bharti Airtel to rapidly extend its GSM footprint in the country and increase its network capacity. The three-year services agreement will see Ericsson manage design, development and deployment of Bharti's network, including capacity and coverage, enabling the operator to expand in rural India and reach out to all towns and cities in 15 regions....

The head of a Washington, DC based media watchdog group is asking that advertisers demand to preview a planned CBS mini series on former President Ronald Reagan before sponsoring the program. Media Reasearch Center President L. Brent Bozell Tuesday sent a letter to each of the nations top 100 advertisers urging them to preview the movie before making a sponsorship decision because it is what Bozell called 'a partisan attack against one of Americas most beloved Presidents.'A review of the script by New York Times writer Jim Reutenberg noted the two part mini series, scheduled for later this month, makes...

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movment in Iran from being reported. From jamming satellite broadcasts, to prohibiting news reporters from covering any demonstrations to shutting down all cell phones and even hiring foreign security to control the population, the regime is doing everything in its power to keep the popular movement from expressing its demand for an end of the regime. These efforts by the regime, while successful in the short term, do not resolve the fundamental reasons why this regime is crumbling from within. Iran is a country ready for a regime...