Sales were weighed down by SEK 7.8 billion due to negative currency effects - a large part of Ericsson's revenues are in dollars. Otherwise, it was a good quarter, according to Narvinger.
We see growth in all our segments, including in three out of four market areas.
Ericsson is the first of the really big companies on the Stockholm Stock Exchange to report first-quarter results.
The company reported a profit by the adjusted EBITA measure of just over SEK 5.5 billion, compared with market expectations of just over SEK 5.8 billion. The company's revenue, totaling SEK 49.3 billion, was also below analysts' forecasts.
In his CEO message, Börje Ekholm highlights a situation with both macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty:
"We are seeing rising input costs, especially for semiconductors, partly caused by increased demand due to AI investments. Our ambition is to compensate for these challenges through close collaboration with customers and suppliers as well as through product substitution and efficiency measures," writes Ekholm.
Ericsson, like its competitors, has struggled with weak demand for a long time, while 5G investments have not yielded the hoped-for results. The company laid off around 1,600 employees in Sweden earlier this year as part of global cost-cutting measures.
At the same time, the share has risen just over 21 percent on the Stockholm Stock Exchange since the start of the year.
