India could be one of the key contributors of unicorns globally: Ericsson’s Börje Ekholm

India is in an exciting position with its digitisation approach on top of the 5G focus, making it crucial for global tech companies, said Börje Ekholm

India could be one of the key contributors of unicorns globally as startups look to create new 5G applications and use cases for the global market leveraging infrastructure deployed by the Indian telecom operators, Swedish telecom gear maker Ericsson’s chief executive officer and chairman told Moneycontrol.

“I’m convinced that on top of the 5G networks, the Indian ecosystem will start to leverage the network's capabilities to bring new and innovative solutions for the global market. So we believe India can be one of the key contributors of unicorns in the future and maybe the next unicorn that creates the new applications for 5G will come from India,” Börje Ekholm told Moneycontrol in an interaction.

The top executive said India is in an exciting position with its digitisation approach on top of the 5G focus, making it crucial for global tech companies.

“It has a lot of promise… It's a big and growing country, but it also has very strong skills in the digital sector. So we are very optimistic about India,” he said.

“You can't go about digitising a country unless you have a digital infrastructure. And that includes the connectivity networks using cloud and leveraging different uses of both technology and AI,” he said.

Asked about Indian telecom operators’ demand to seek a ‘fair share’ contribution from over-the-top (OTT) players, the executive said, “We need to get more revenues into the industry…although the fair share is really for our telco customers to negotiate… Let's see where that takes you but those are hard things to get to happen.”

Ekholm, however, said that Ericsson is helping telecom operators monetise their 5G investments by creating an ecosystem for developers to start using the network's features and develop new types of use cases and applications. “While the fair share is for telcos to look into, we can help them with APIs (application programming interfaces) because that's an opportunity to monetise the network features. And we can create that market, which I think is starting to show some promise now.”

Ekholm said that the Indian government’s move to auction spectrum every year is good for the industry and helps telcos plan their strategy. “What really constrains wireless communications is spectrum… We have shown over history that the most important part is the additional new licensed spectrum. It is needed to have a network that you actually control.”

He said that governments the world over are following the same strategy of releasing new bands of spectrum to telcos, which will help shape the upcoming 6G strategy requirement. “The most important part of 6G may be defining what new spectrums will be available. From a technological point of view, 6G is more likely to be an evolution of 5G. You will have innovations that will give new use cases and new types of benefits, but in reality, the architecture may well follow 5G.”