Hans Vestberg

“I was taking a break from university so I could play handball full-time for a year.”

“There are so many devices that can receive video, creating complexities, because suddenly you can have a TV, laptop, smartphone, pads. And they are of different sizes. It's clear that you need to standardise and get a much more efficient TV delivery.”

“I have rules for everything.”

“I said we're going to leave phones, and so we did. We sold it to Sony.”

“When I look into the Ericsson's mobility report that has predictions till 2018, the majority of people having mobile broadband by 2018 will be on 3G.”

“I need to build my team around my weaknesses.”

“What was really tough for me was that Lars Magnus Ericsson founded Ericsson in 1876; we've always had a consumer product. And I'm the 16th CEO of Ericsson, and I decided that we don't have any consumer products anymore.”

“You don't need to recall 100,000 cars because you need to fix something. That can be done with a download of software.”

“If I am in Sweden, I try to get home to be with my children. I can do work after that from home.”

“By the end of 2020, the only region of the world that will still have a lot of 2G connections may be Africa.”

“Today there are two points where a car manufacturer has interaction with you as an owner of a car. One, you buy the car. Two, you go to the car shop to repair the car.”

“You can always think that we're old and not innovative, but there is no company that can limp on for 139 years without being creative and having the genes to change.”

“The infrastructure we provide is the same in a remote town in Africa or New York or an archipelago in Sweden: we use the same system, and the chips inside the phone are the same.”

“It is very difficult for me to speculate as to how long it will take for the LTE-TDD ecosystem to mature. Of course, the whole industry is speaking of scale and a combination of scale in order to get more efficiency in the ecosystem.”

“Remember, China is the largest country in the world, so they have the confidence, the capital and resources to create large companies.”

“We need to understand what innovation will be built on top of our networks.”

“I believe mobile technology has a much broader role to play. It could solve some of the biggest problems on earth.”

“For us to stay competitive, we're transforming our services business to be reliable and flexible.”

“We want to be number one, from the ingestion of content to the play-out to any type of channel. Everything between there, you should see Ericsson if you are a broadcaster, telecoms operator, or cable operator.”

“It's always great to have a purpose of a meeting and an ending for it, but it's even more important to be present and have an engagement on the topic you're doing, to create an environment and energy around that meeting, so everybody goes from there, 'That's great; we can take it forward!'”