Swedish vendor Ericsson has doubled its lead in the mobile networking kit market according to new data from Dell’Oro, reports Reuters. Ericsson’s market share for the second quarter stood at 32 percent – the same figure as a year ago – but it extended its lead to 12 percentage points because its nearest rival, Nokia Siemens Networks, saw its market share reduce from 26 percent to 20 percent. Among the Asian vendors, Huawei increased its market share to 17 percent from 10 percent, while fellow Chinese vendor ZTE doubled its share to 8 percent. The two Chinese vendors are deemed to have gained global market share via aggressive pricing policies and financial support from state-run banks.

According to Dell’Oro, Alcatel-Lucent was another major vendor to lose market share, dropping to 12 percent from 14 percent a year ago, being overtaken by Huawei in the process. Alcatel-Lucent has forecast the market to shrink 8-12 percent in 2009, while NSN has said the market would fall by 10 percent. However, Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg told Reuters in an interview last week that mobile operators appear to have stopped cutting spending on network equipment, suggesting a recovery in the market was imminent. “The whole world is suffering from decline that is bigger than anything we’ve seen… [but] it is not our impression that there is further cutting being made,” he said. Ericsson has also been boosted recently by its planned acquisition of key mobile assets from bankrupt Canadian equipment maker Nortel Networks. Svanberg said last week that he expected the Nortel deal to close “very soon.”