As January drew to a close, Ericsson announced the sale of its Media Solutions business to One Equity Partners.
The private equity company became the new majority owner of Media Solutions, having bought 51 per cent of shares, and the deal is expected to be closed in Q3.
When that time comes, staff will be transferred over to the new business, and Angel Ruiz, Media Solutions president and CEO, will be a prominent figure in that transition.
“With One Equity Partners’ deep expertise in media and telecom investments, this is a truly exciting time for our company,” says Ruiz, who will continue to lead the Media Solutions business.
“We will establish Media Solutions as a premier independent, pure-play technology vendor with strong and committed financial support, while driving continued investment in innovation and growth.”
He continues: “Over the past several years, Ericsson has transformed Media Solutions’ portfolio with a cloud-enabled, standards-based integrated end-to-end roadmap. We have both the hardware and software solutions that directly respond to the greatest period of transformation our industry has ever seen – and we know where the media journey is heading.”
The effect of rapid digitisation throughout our industry is clear for all to see, and Ruiz believes that Ericsson has it covered.
“This dynamic media ecosystem is completely reconfiguring expectations of immediacy, simplicity and availability of content, with consumers expecting to discover, watch and share video content whenever they like,” he says.
“Our media portfolio includes six technology and engineering Emmys for our offerings, including hardware and software video compression solutions for contribution and direct-to-consumer video service distribution, advertising and content personalization solutions, high efficiency cloud DVR, and TV and video delivery platforms.”
Ruiz goes on to state that Ericsson currently has 18 million pay-TV subscribers across 26 countries, while enabling the delivery of digital media services to over one billion homes globally. The company also records three million video assets on a daily basis, with over 200 petabytes of time-shifted video storage deployed.
Ruiz concludes: “With these significant strides towards building a strong and extensive end-to-end portfolio we are excited to deliver true innovation and enhance our longstanding customer relationships globally.”
