Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (publ) (NASDAQ:ERIC) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call July 12, 2024 4:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Daniel Morris - Head of Investor Relations
Borje Ekholm - President and Chief Executive Officer
Lars Sandstrom - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Francois-Xavier Bouvignies - UBS
Alexander Duval - Goldman Sachs
Andreas Joelsson - Carnegie
Andrew Gardiner - Citi
Sandeep Deshpande - JPMorgan
Joachim Gunell - DNB Markets
Daniel Djurberg - Handelsbanken
Erik Lindholm-Rojestal - SEB
Sami Sarkamies - Danske Bank
Joseph Zhou - Barclays
Felix Henriksson - Nordea Markets
Janardan Menon - Jefferies
Richard Kramer - Arete Research
Didier Scemama - Bank of America

Daniel Morris

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's presentation of Ericsson's Second Quarter 2024 Results. Today, Borje Ekholm, our President and CEO, joins us by video, and Lars Sandstrom, Chief Financial Officer, is here in the studio with me.

As usual, we'll have a short presentation followed by Q&A. And in order to ask a question, you'll need to join the conference by phone. Details can be found in today's earnings release and on the Investor Relations website. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded and that today's presentation may include forward-looking statements.

These statements are based on our current expectations and certain planning assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. The actual results may differ materially due to factors mentioned in today's press release and discussed in the conference call. We encourage you to read about these risks and uncertainties in our earnings report as well as in our annual report.

I'll now hand the call over to Borje and Lars for their introductory comments.

Borje Ekholm

Well, thanks Daniel, and good morning, everyone. First, I'd like to cover some of the key highlights from the quarter before Lars really goes through all the financials in more detail.

So, in Q2, we continue to work with our customers and focus on leveraging our leading technology as well as optimizing our business through our strategic initiatives, which of course includes our cost reduction actions that we have taken.

All these actions made it possible to deliver a very strong performance, and we saw an expansion of the gross margin despite a very challenging overall RAN and mobile networks market.

So, gross margin for the group came in at 43.9% and this was supported by the proactive actions and our competitive portfolio. It was of course positively impacted by a new 5G licensing agreement and we're now clearly on track to deliver our SEK12 billion to SEK13 billion revenue target for IPR for 2024.