Wireless infrastructure equipment revenues stabilized in the third quarter of 2012 reaching only $11.3 billion – a 1.0 percent decrease from the second quarter of 2012 and a 10.3 percent decrease from the same quarter one year ago.

“Nokia Siemens share of RAN grew by the largest amount of 4.2 points quarter–over-quarter to 22.4 percent to narrowly miss Ericsson’s 22.9 percent at the number two spot. Samsung’s RAN revenues grew 1.1 points to 5 percent. Both companies attribute their share gains to success with LTE deployments with Nokia Siemens LTE revenues growing 4 times sequentially,” says Nick Marshall, principal analyst, mobile networks.

Huawei’s RAN revenues fell by 15.2 percent sequentially, although the company retains its number one spot in the RAN market share rankings at 24.3 percent. Alcatel-Lucent holds on to its number one rank in RAN share with a value of 14.3 percent -- down only 0.8 points from last quarter. ZTE retains the number five market share rank in the third quarter although seeing revenues 15 percent drop from last year.

“There is no question that the RAN market has been squeezed in 2012, although we have seen improvements in the 3Q, being 8 percent down from the 14 percent decrease we saw in 1Q,” says Aditya Kaul, practice director, mobile networks. “Even with 4Q bringing in the traditional Christmas cheer, 2012 will end up 10 percent down at the very least, which is bound to cause market share shifts especially in the top three,” adds Kaul.

This quarterly market data package tracks wireless RAN and infrastructure revenue and market share by vendor. These findings are part of ABI Research’s Macro Basestations Research Service, which includes additional Competitive Analyses, Vendor Matrices, Market Data, and Insights.