[Ericsson]CEO letter January 21, 2009

[心得]


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[文章]

Dear colleagues,

Today we announce our result for the fourth quarter and full year 2008. We make this announcement ahead of time again since our result is significantly higher than market expectations. We have therefore agreed with the stock exchange to make the announcement today.

We can look back at a solid performance in 2008. Sales grew by 11 %, our margins have steadily improved and our financial position remains strong. This is obviously the result of tremendous work done by everybody in the company and I would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all of you.

So far, we have seen only limited effects in our industry from the global financial crisis, except from the handset market that is seriously affected. In general the operators have healthy financial positions, networks are fairly loaded and there is a strong traffic growth. It would, however, be unreasonable to believe that we will remain unaffected also in 2009. We see a lot of uncertainties in consumer spend and how operators will act.

As you all know, we started to save costs one year ago and we have actually exceeded our cost saving target for the year, with savings of SEK 6.5 billion launched already. We stand strong and we have the opportunity to come out of this turmoil even stronger than we were going into it, while many of our competitors are struggling. But that means that we have to do even more.

Therefore we will continue with cost savings also this year, targeting savings of 10 BSEK. We will achieve this by leveraging synergies between our different technologies and by taking advantage of opportunities in the transformation to all-IP. We will also reduce the number of software platforms and increase the re-use of hardware. In addition, we will consolidate our activities to fewer sites and move certain activities to low-cost countries. This will also result in staff reduction of some 5,000 people globally.

The savings activities will result in a more efficient way of working and we should therefore be able to achieve these savings while keeping our strategy and unique capabilities intact.

Remember what we have said so many times before. We need strong profitability in order to control our own destiny. We have improved our margins in 2008 and we have to relentlessly continue to perfect our performance while staying close to our customers.

These are tough times, but in tough times the strong can get stronger. I know that we have what it takes to take advantage of the current situation to further extend our leadership and outperform competition.

Best regards,

Carl-Henric Svanberg

President and CEO