Although Nokia has struggled to compete with major players like Ericsson and Huawei in recent years, the Finnish company remains a major player in the network infrastructure sector. Samsung also has its own Radio Access Network (RAN) business, but it is relatively small, with a reported market share of around 6.1% last year.
Rumors have started circulating in the industry that Samsung is interested in buying Nokia's infrastructure business to strengthen its own position in RAN. A price of $10 billion has been mentioned for the sale. If the deal goes through, Samsung would effectively become the second largest RAN vendor in the world, with a market share of 25.6%.
Samsung already makes 4G and 5G base stations, chipsets, devices, radios and core equipment, so the Korean giant is no stranger to infrastructure. It has already supplied operators around the world, including Telus Canada, O2 in Germany, Reliance Jio in India, KDDI and NTT DoCoMo in Japan, Dish and Verizon in the US and Vodafone in the UK.
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