Samsung has won a $6.64 billion order in the United States from Verizon. The South Korean company secured its first major deal to provide 5G wireless communication solutions since Huawei’s ouster, a big development for the firm in the 5G market.

Verizon and Samsung have been in business prior to the deal, with Huawei out of the way, Samsung became the first choice for Verizon’s 5G wireless solutions.

Nokia and Ericsson became preferred choices of Western countries following the security concerns that are forcing many of them to sever ties with Huawei. But the Verizon deal has introduced a new player in the 5G market.

“Samsung winning the order from Verizon would expand its telecom equipment business abroad, potentially giving leverage to negotiate with other countries,” said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment and Securities.

Huawei leads the 2019 global market share of 5G telecom equipment with 28%, followed by Nokia 16%, Ericsson 14%, ZTE 10%, Cisco 7% and Samsung 3%, according to market research firm Dell’Oro Group.

Samsung did not give details of the deal but said it is for telecom equipment. The contract will run from June 30, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2025, Samsung said, adding that the contract presents them the opportunity to push boundaries of 5G innovation.

“With this latest long-term strategic contract, we will continue to push the boundaries of 5G innovation to enhance mobile experiences for Verizon’s customers,” the company said.

The United States has continued to press its allies to boot Huawei out and many are succumbing to the pressure. The United Kingdom has asked the Chinese telecom Giant to stop its 5G deployment in the country, just as France, Canada and some others have done.

However, the decision to kick Huawei out has come at a high cost for countries where Huawei 5G deployment has already taken place. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said removing and replacing equipment made by Huawei and ZTE from their wireless networks will cost US rural telecom operators $1.837 billion.

The United States is on a campaign to replace all 5G equipment installed by Huawei and ZTE with those from companies they can trust.

“By identifying the presence of insecure equipment and services in our networks, we can now work to ensure that these networks – especially those of the small and rural carriers – rely on infrastructure from trusted vendors,” FCC said in a statement.

The FCC said the carriers would be reimbursed for the replacements of Huawei equipment and there is about $1.618 billion for that purpose.

Last month, French telecom operator Bouygues Telecom’s deputy CEO Olivier Roussat announced plans to dismantle 3,000 Huawei-made mobile antennas in France’s highly populated areas by 2028, according to CX Tech.

US mobile operators are expected to start dismantling Huawei’s 5G infrastructures soon, and that creates opportunity for more players in the 5G market.

Samsung’s contract with Verizon sends a message to Nokia and Ericsson that more players are there to contend with in the 5G market.

While your demographic location has easy access to getting credit,  considerably steady electricity supply, less hassle in dealing with  construction permits, easy trading across border, likelihood to resolving insolvency faster, regular taxes payment, and the rest four ranking metrics used by World Bank, yours, as a country, can as well rank quite high when it comes to Ease of Doing Business.

A quite high ease of doing business ranking indicates that an economy is quite conducive to the starting and operation of a local firm.  The rankings are determined by sorting and weighing the aggregate scores on 10 topics some of which are listed earlier, profiling almost 200 countries on the planet accordingly, year in, year out.

Citing a certain report of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics which claims that roughly 20% of small businesses fail within their first year of establishments, and then about 50% are already out of existence by 5th years of creation, this report stemming out of US might be too good to even be true for less thriving economies/continents where those metrics for ranking are sort of poor and largely unencouraging.

Why do businesses fail? Aside from internal problems, businesses and establishments not being some isolated entities from the prevailing situations of a  country get affected also by policies, political sway, and name-it situational happenings obtainable in a geographical location, called a nation.

So it is fair to admit that all things being equal, by statistics, a business founded in France (Europe) has about double the chance of surviving the first year of establishment compared to Democratic Republic of Congo (Africa) because those 10 determining metrics are more positive in the former than the latter. Reasons are so obvious to tell, at least for the now.

With an interest to probe ranking of countries according to how supporting when it comes to starting and running a business from 2016 till present,  here is a link of a report to an interactive report showing how countries and continents compare,  I put together in that regard.

OBSERVATIONS:

1. The land of the Kiwis, New Zealand, has remained the most business friendly over the past 5 years, while Somalia has remained the least in supporting business. Oh Somalia?! 

2. Europe ranked the highest among the continents on average with most business friendly conditions and Africa the very least. It might not be too hard to tell while Africa is the least, no thanks to warmongering, inter-tribal conflicts, consistent power outage, stunted credit facility, and so on.

3. While Bill Gates quipped years back that we tend to overestimate what we can do in one year, but underestimate what we can achieve in a decade (paraphrased), according to this 5 years report (half a decade), nothing humongously substantial has changed: the best has remained the best, while the worst has continued to almost maintain the status quo in their business-support system.

4. An exception to observation 3 above pertaining to Africa is Kenya: Something is happening in Kenya which has seen it vacate position number 10 

5 years ago to being ranked 4th in 2020; whereas Ghana ranked 11th half a decade ago, is now 17th on the chart. 

In the meantime, Nigeria, the most populous black nation, ranked in another recent report by Bloomberg as largest economy in Africa has not made a major leap but rather dancing in the region of twenties (Year 2020 the best so far, ranked as 21st)

5. Singapore (in Asia) is giving New Zealand (in Oceania) a run for her money. The elevating consistency Singapore has been exhibiting is undeniable and 

will likely topple New Zealand in a matter of a year or two, going by projection of data, as the world capital country for ease of running business.

CONCLUSION

The purpose of analysis among others is to lay bare the state of things in the now, how things were, and how things could be using predictive analytics if necessary.  For instance, countries with rather poor rating in getting credit, getting  electricity, paying taxes, protecting minority investors, are by default going to be very low-ranked while the reverse will be for highly ranked countries which hold promises for starting and smooth-running of businesses. 

I will conclude by saying that data analytics is good, if it drives some action. Will countries with consistently low ranks be concerned with their positions which discourage foreign direct investment? The answer is in 5, 10 years from now.

Report (Dashboard) Link here.