EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Ericsson’s incoming CTO Ulf Ewaldsson has told Mobile World Live that the company expects to see further consolidation in the mobile network equipment market and claims the Swedish vendor knows what it needs to do to stay on top of a highly competitive sector.

In a video interview filmed towards the end of last year while in his role of Head of Product Area Radio within Ericsson's Business Unit Networks division (Ewaldsson was announced as Ericsson’s next CTO last Friday, a position he will assume from February 1), Ericsson’s new head of technology stated: “I think we will see further consolidation, but I also foresee that we will see not only the traditional sort of radio vendors consolidate. I think also we will see the emergence of opportunities for new types of relationships with more data oriented companies, more router oriented companies and so forth to, to be related closer with the traditional telecom vendors and I think that one of the driving forces there, of course, is that the operators, if everything goes very well, they will be able to provide not only the traditional connectivity, but they might even be able to provide the entire cloud service, and then, of course, we will see a vendor side of the industry that corresponds to that need.”

Having proclaimed itself as the ‘LTE market leader,’ Ericsson is now facing intense competition from Chinese rivals Huawei and ZTE as well as western firms Nokia Siemens Networks and Alcatel-Lucent. “Our strategy to stay competitive is to continue to focus on performance and make sure that the performance is more important than having all the features in the network,” said Ewaldsson. “I think features are still important, but they have to be timed with the handsets and ensure that they hit the market at the same time… The vendor market is changing and the rise of Huawei and ZTE and new competitors is, of course, making us try and work even harder with the values that we think are important, especially when it comes to quality and performance of our equipment.”

Elsewhere in the interview Ewaldsson predicts a timeframe for commercial deployment of LTE-Advanced services and growth expectations for TD-LTE technology. View the full video interview here.