Ericsson (ADR) (ERIC) To Streamline $1.2Bn By 2017: Rima Qureshi

Ericsson (ADR) (NASDAQ:ERIC) may be far from bankruptcy, but the company is looking to streamline its costs to the tune of $1.2 billion by 2017, Rima Qureshi revealed in a discussion on CNBC.

According to the Ericsson (ADR) (NASDAQ:ERIC) Chief Strategy Officer and Head of M&A, there still isn’t a definite number of jobs that the company plans to cut. She admitted, however, that as the company looks to see where they can make savings, there may be job cuts ahead as the firm streamlines its processes to be more efficient.

Commenting about the recent acquisitions the company has done, the executive said that the overarching goal for the company is matching the resources they have acquired to their strategy of establishing their business in targeted areas and expanding into new areas.

According to Qureshi, people who think Ericsson (ADR) (NASDAQ:ERIC) is trying to be too many things to too many people at once should note that the company’s approach to business is essentially taking their expertise and looking to the needs of the industries they support in the future and providing the solutions for these needs.

“Everyone is looking at using mobility more. We are talking about the benefits of mobility, broadband and cloud and what we are trying to do is basically enable all of the services that the consumer wants to use. What we see from our Ericsson mobility report is in 2020, more than 50% of all traffic on the mobile networks will actually be video traffic. What we are doing is acquiring the assets [and] building the capabilities that would allow us to enable the operators and the consumers to do this. That’s basically our core strength,” Qureshi said.

Another example she noted was about their acquisitions in the content space. She said that their acquisitions in this area is not actually about the content itself but rather the ability to stream content more efficiently. She said that her company has been working on areas such as compression for this field to ensure that Ericsson provides the solutions that enable better viewing of content on mobile networks.

The executive said that what Ericsson (ADR) (NASDAQ:ERIC) is looking at when they are expanding is “very targeted”. She said that they are targeting the cloud, internet protocol communications, consumer experience through operations support solutions, television and media, and other industries that can benefit from the company’s expertise.

Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies has reported that by the end of the third quarter of the year, it owned about 1.2 million Ericsson (ADR) (NASDAQ:ERIC) shares.