One expatriate manager at Eden suare in 2008 gave me that info. He may have exaggerated. A few years later there was a massive layoff of engineering staff after Huawei invaded their turf.

Nokia-Siemens lasted from 2006/2007 to 2013/2014.

A few points on my side:

1. Ericsson mainly rolled out for Yu ( which was sold ) and Orange ( which swapped out Ericcson for Huawei & ZTE ). It also had massive business with Airtel but was swapped out by Nokia .
Ericsson remained in Orange mobile now Telkom mobile where they run the core.
Access is where they were swapped out for Huawei and ZTE.
They still have some small business with Airtel.
In Safaricom they have business in microwave links.


2. Huawei have massive business with Safaricom & the Govt( security project) .

3. Removing Huawei is an incredibly massive undertaking mainly because as much as vendors are to follow 3GPP standards , there is flexibility to deviate slightly to match customer specific requirements.

4. UK ban on Huawei is due to US restriction on Huawei using chips from their companies. Chips are the heart of the equipment and subject to security vulnerabilities.

If the chip vendors cannot support on patch updates for the chips then the network becomes exposed . Huawei will manufacture their chips but it will take a number of years to get to the level of reliability & trust on security.

5G has incredibly sensitive use cases such as autonomous driving ,automated ports , connected health etc which if exposed can shut down an economy hence any unknown is already viewed as a potential security issue.

5. It will be interesting to see the direction Safaricom takes on this matter given the massive investment & autonomy they have from Vodafone group

Is there a correlation between those and the price direction?

“I have not seen any letter or document about stopping the project and we cannot stop even if we are asked to do so. We are an independent country,” Mr Mucheru told the Business Daily in the sidelines of a digital police occurrence book launch in Nairobi.

“Again, the government does not deal with vendors. It’s the service providers who will decide who to work with”.

The US has been urging its European allies and others not to use Huawei, one of Safaricom’s network vendors along with Nokia, citing security concerns.
Involving Huawei in Safaricom’s 5G network could emerge in talks on a free trade agreement between the US and Kenya, analysts said.

For Safaricom, the 5G service is a central part of its attempts to further expand its data business to counter slower growth in voice calls revenue.