爱立信变革的报告

摘要：在现今竞争激烈的IT产业，企业想要存活，应该根据市场发展和消费者需求快速变化。在这方面，爱立信是一个很好的例子。所以这篇报告会在介绍爱立信公司背景和变革的基础之上，讨论爱立信采用了什么方式应对艰难的市场环境以及还需要怎样进一步的改变。

关键词：变革；文化；战略

Introduction

Ericsson, Sweden’s largest tax payer in the IT industry, after a decade of growth, saw its glory fade and faced a serious operating loss when the internal and external problems emerged in 2001.

Opened in 1876 by Lars Magnus Ericsson, Ericsson transformed itself from a repair shop into a monopoly state telephone operators and supplied complete mobile telephony systems, and Ericsson was, until 2003, a world leader in telecom infrastructure equipment. At its early stage, considering the importance of technical innovations, Ericsson had heavily invested in Research and Development (R&D) department, which was the key reason for its success and was still a significant feature in today’s corporation. The 1990s were a prosperous decade for Ericsson and its competitors for the telecom industry, and led by CEO and President Lars Ramqvist, Ericsson could by 1998 report its highest earnings in history and a market capitalization nine times higher than in 1990.

However, when then traditional fixed-line business and the smaller-enterprise systems division experienced a declining in the market, and the exaggerated appearance in 3G caused the overinvestment in the licenses, by the meantime, facing the downturn of the economy, Ericsson was starting to go downward. Kurt Hellstrom, as president with Ramqvist, quickly launched a string of restructuring programs to save the company.

During the two painful years , three cost-cutting programs were announced by Ericsson, aiming at reducing the number of external R&D consultants and temporary workers, as well as cutting travel and other expenses. Moreover, the saving was amounted to SEK50 billion. The doubtful analysts and worried staff were challenging the management stabilization of the company. In the fall of 2002, it came as a surprise when an outsider was presented as Ericsson’s new CEO and President: Carl-Henric Svanberg, with no previous experience in the telecom industry. After spending time getting to know the company, its people and technologies, Svanberg invested in the company as he had done in his former firm, showing the signals of his expectation and participation in the future of the company, and added some measures to the continuous restructuring programs. Svanberg felt that was not enough to drive their own destiny and pitched his idea of a fourth saving program to get profit again.. In spite of travelling to Ericsson’s large customers and introducing himself and maintain the relationship, Svanberg dealt with the another major task which was energizing the organization and came up with “seven steps toward regained world leadership”.